People who worked on pandemic preparedness anticipated the Great Toilet Paper Shortage of spring 2020. But many other things about the #Covid-19 pandemic have come as a surprise. I've chronicled some of them. https://t.co/yLtEtNM5cA
— Helen Branswell ???? (@HelenBranswell) December 27, 2022
Here’s a separate post, for the people who didn’t have time to read the link in my latest Covid Update Friday morning. Helen Branswell has been one of my go-to sources for pandemic information over the last three years:
People who study infectious diseases and who work in public health have long known a bad pandemic would one day come.
They knew such an event would overwhelm hospitals, strain supply chains, and place stresses on society that we would be ill-equipped to meet. Countries like the United States have for decades prepared to respond to such a crisis.
But despite all the planning, the Covid-19 pandemic has, in myriad ways, not played out as expected. Three years after the first reports of a novel virus emerged from China, these experts admit that the microbe and the world’s response to it have continuously deviated from their forecasts.
In the hope that important lessons for next time can be found in the things we didn’t anticipate this time, STAT asked 23 experts what had surprised them the most about the pandemic.
The TL;DR version: We have a lot of learning left to do.
Containment can buy time
… After China successfully slowed the spread of the new virus with draconian measures limiting individuals’ movements, many countries instituted some versions of what came to be known as “lockdown.” In some cases the actions were too late or too inefficiently implemented to make a big difference. But a number of countries deployed these measures with significant success; New Zealand, Australia, Singapore, South Korea, and Japan, among others, lost far fewer lives than peer nations. And of course China, where the pandemic began, kept Covid largely at bay until very recently, albeit with restrictions that would not be accepted in other parts of the world.The WHO pandemic flu response plan is being updated to incorporate what was learned about containment efforts during Covid. Cowling said it won’t advise long-term efforts to try to stop a new pandemic virus, but “temporary containment to buy time, actually, I think some places will consider.”…
How variable the illness was
Covid has killed millions around the world, including more than 1 million in the United States. But some people who have been infected have no symptoms at all. Others have the equivalent of a head cold.Some patterns are intuitive. Many of the deaths have been in people in their 70s, 80s, and beyond. Many have been in people with chronic health conditions that undermine their ability to fight off the infection.
But sometimes the variability of the illness makes little sense, a fact that has surprised Deepta Bhattacharya, professor of immunology at the University of Arizona College of Medicine…
How quickly people could be reinfected
While an ever-dwindling number of people have not yet experienced a Covid infection, some have been infected several times. For some, the interval between Covid bouts is amazingly short.“Anecdotally, I know several instances where infections occurred, the infection resolved clinically, and then the person became symptomatic again with SARS-CoV-2 positivity a few weeks after the initial infection,” said Stanley Perlman, a longtime coronavirus researcher at the University of Iowa…
The biggest surprise, hands down: How the virus has evolved
… Coronaviruses don’t change very quickly, they aren’t as mutable as, say, influenza viruses, those experts said. In fact, the spike protein on the virus’ exterior, the one that attaches to human cells and triggers infection, cannot change too much without losing its ability to infect, they assured the rest of us.That was the dogma. Then came the variants: Alpha, Beta, Delta, and Omicron, with its mind-boggling array of mutations. Since it emerged in late 2021, Omicron has splintered into a seemingly endless succession of subvariants, which continue to mutate and evade immunity induced by prior infection and immunization…
The susceptibility of the public to charlatans
… The Covid pandemic has been a field day for quacks and crooks. They’ve made a killing.It is ever thus, some would surely say. But Bieniasz has been stunned by the degree to which a not-small portion of the population has been taken in by hucksters — and by the inability of the scientific community to break that spell.
“The sort of willingness of Joe Public to listen to anybody with a large Twitter following has just shocked and appalled me,” Bieniasz said. He sees this as a consequence of a huge loss of trust in the scientific community.
The reverberations of this loss of trust continue, even though the acute phase of the pandemic appears to be subsiding…
Covid vaccines — so many surprises
For quite a few of the people interviewed for this article, the speed with which Covid vaccines were developed was truly unexpected. Ran Balicer, director of Israel’s Clalit Research Institute, encapsulated that view: “Vaccine(s) ready, tested, and launched in under a year.”For others, the surprise was how effective the vaccines were. “I was on the Pfizer DSMB” — the data and safety monitoring board, a group of independent experts that oversees a clinical trial — “and was one of the people that unblinded that study the first time and saw the 95% efficacy. Basically it just brought tears to my eyes,” said Kathryn Edwards, a professor of pediatrics and vice-chair for clinical research at Vanderbilt University…
Perhaps the biggest vaccines surprise, though, was the speed at which gobsmacking amounts of vaccine were produced. Billions and billions of doses in the first year of production alone.
Hatchett has spent nearly two decades working on pandemic preparedness. The past three years have held few surprises for him. But he marveled at what he called “this truly miraculous scaling of production.”…
How long the damn thing has lasted
Pandemics are rare occurrences; fewer than a handful have happened in the age of modern virology, when laboratories could provide detailed knowledge of what was causing the illness and how that pathogen was evolving.The pandemics that have been recorded have mainly been caused by flu. And in the recorded flu pandemics, there was generally a wave or two — sometimes, in some places three — and then humans and the new virus reached a detente. The new flu virus settled into causing seasonal flu activity, not pandemic flu.
A lot of people STAT spoke to thought that was the way this pandemic would play out. They didn’t anticipate that we’d be where we are now, with waves of transmission still occurring at various points in the year, rather than during the winter, as is the way of most respiratory pathogens…
The panic-neglect cycle persists
Over the past couple of decades, the world has gone through a number of big disease scares. SARS-1. The H1N1 flu pandemic. MERS. Zika. Ebola. With each, the world raced to respond.And each time, as the panic eased, neglect kicked in. Rather than recognizing these events as warnings that longer-term investments and structural changes were needed to safeguard the globe against the next one, the world moved on. As it appears to be doing now.
“We’ve seen in other epidemics this happening,” said Berkley, the Gavi CEO. “But you kind of thought with this one, it was so global, it was so big that I would not have expected it to have happened so quickly.”…
I haven’t even included all the *headers* from this long, informative piece. If you’ve got some downtime over this weekend, I would highly recommend reading the whole thing!
davecb
One thing I wasn’t surprised by was the speed and enthusiasm with which large commercial landlords declared the epidemic over and a return to the office was safe. A variant of the panic-neglect cycle, with concentration on the neglect.
Suzanne
It seems to me that all of the failures around predicting public behavior all stem from the same thing: that people generally respond to incentives. For people who were at lower risk of a bad outcome from COVID, the incentives weren’t really great for that individual. That left us trying to appeal to their better angels, and that will never work. Especially when that entails sacrifice of money, stability, and status.
Barbara
I can’t thank you enough Anne Laurie for your devotion to the cause of keeping us informed these last two plus years. Your work has been truly remarkable and I am very grateful.
Lapassionara
@Barbara: Ditto! I don’t know how you do it, but these posts have been a godsend. Many thanks.
Amir Khalid
It just turned midnight where I am. Happy new year, everyone.
Alison Rose
Funny, because this did not surprise me in the least. I mean, some of their ideas did, because they were just batshit insane. But the notion that a lot of people would refuse to accept basic science and would instead easily glom onto stupid bullshit is probably the least surprising thing about this country in re the pandemic.
Alison Rose
@Amir Khalid: I know we’ve been saying this for about six years now, but I hope 2023 is better for you and for all of us. Happy new year!
Baud
@Amir Khalid:
Selamat tahun Baru!
JPL
It’s been 3 years since we started reading about the virus in Wuhan. Personally, it seems so much longer.
Queen of Lurkers
@Barbara: +1
Total gratitude for years of curating reliable information on COVID.
JPL
@Amir Khalid: Happy New Year.
arrieve
When I was in the middle of my own bout of Covid a few weeks ago, I noticed that And the Band Played On was available on HBO and I watched it again, for the first time probably since it first came out. I’m old enough to remember the AIDS plague years very well and to have known several people who died, but watching it again with the perspective of these past few years, I was struck by all the differences in how people reacted.
I remember AIDS panic, the refusal to go within a mile of anyone who could even be suspected of being a carrier, the calls for putting the sick and not yet sick into camps and tattooing them. I never could have predicted how different this pandemic would be. Quack cures yes. Desperate people are willing to try anything, like cancer patients going to Mexico for laetrile in the Seventies. But the outright denial–people who were screaming that Covid wasn’t real even as they were being intubated–is something I couldn’t have imagined. I still find it hard to believe.
Maybe it was that for many people, it really was like a bad cold. Or that there was no marginalized group that could be easily scapegoated. You don’t see so many idiots trying to say that it isn’t real anymore; they’ve switched to saying OK it’s real but it’s not that bad, or OK, it was real but now it’s over
ETA: And adding my thanks to AL.
davecb
@Suzanne:
Hmmn, I think incentive and the consideration of risks come second.
First comes the immediate, emotional reaction to the announcement of an epidemic. I desire it to be
Initially I’m going to assume both are true, and I’m not going to be budged unless I hear about something that makes me sit down and consider whether I need to change my mind.
I don’t like changing my mind, so I’m not likely to sit down and apply logic to it unless I have a very good reason to do so.
What would be a good reason? A story that strikes me harshly.
In my youth, that story was another kid catching polio, being confined in vain to an iron lung, and strangling to death in horrible pain.
That’s what motivated my parents to have me vaccinated against polio.
The memory of it was what made me cautious about SARS and then COVID. Then and only then did I look at my risks, listen to the impassioned “incentives” of Drs Teresa Tam (Canada) and Anthony Fauci (US). And then adopt my parents’ logic.
Then and only then did I do the logic again for myself, and come to the same conclusion as they had.
eachother
Add me to the thank you card.
AL. You are the best.
Laurie Garrett knew. The coming Plague. 1994.
Anoniminous
I knew that anecdotally not surprised to see it confirmed. Neither am I surprised there’s a question about relapse versus reinfection. Given the rate of sequelae and Long Covid my guess is SARS-CoV-2 will join the list of Varicella-zoster virus, measles virus, HIV-1, human cytomegalovirus, & etc. causing persistent latent infections. We know somatic mosaicism* is A Thing with diseases so there’s no great surprise if it turns out the Covid virus can latch on to an infected cell’s Molecular Biology as a nice place to call home.
* occurrence of two or more genetically distinct populations of cells within an individual
Alison Rose
A nice op-ed about Dr Fauci: (written by Peter Staley, who was in ACT UP from the early days)
Joy in FL
I also want to add my thanks for all the posts over all these months. I felt better reading sources you included, rather than making my own uninformed guesses.
middlelee
Thanks Anne Laurie for your work in keeping us informed. Your posts have been my go-to since spring 2020.
Barbara
@arrieve: Variability in severity and not so subtle messaging that minority groups were perceived to be at greater risk doomed any kind of solidarity. IMHO
Anoniminous
@arrieve:
The Stages of a Disaster:
1. Those “Experts” (sneer) don’t know what they are talking about
2. OK, they MAY know what they are talking about but it won’t happen here
3. Alright — it MAY happen here but it won’t be as bad as they say
4. WHY DIDN’T ANYBODY TELL ME THIS COULD HAPPEN?!?!?!?!?!?!
FYI, regarding Global Warming and Climate Change we’re still at 1.
gene108
@davecb:
@Suzanne:
Most people want to live under the illusion that (1) they’ll always be healthy and relatively free from illness, and (2) if they have an illness they personally can find ways to deal with the illness without seeing a doctor, like large doses of vitamins, certain foods or drinks, etc.
Coming to the realization that you can readily become ill and have little control about the progression of the illness is really, really unbelievably hard for many people to accept.*
*ETA “to accept”
opiejeanne
@davecb: We took it seriously because the first deaths* were right down the road and the stories were terrifying. We stayed home for over 2 years, hardly leaving our property in that whole time, and discovered the joy of Having Stuff Delivered. As soon as the vaccine was available we tried for six weeks to get it, and nearly cried with relief when we finally did, and we have gotten every booster since.
Then we continued to quarantine until this year, and this year is when we caught it, on the train coming home from Chicago.
*That anyone knew of at first.
Baud
@Anoniminous:
5. I blame Biden.
schrodingers_cat
The pandemic was not a complete surprise to the experts but the braindead and unscientific response in some political quarters probably was.
OT: From the dead thread below.
Happy New Year’s Eve to all Jackals and lurkers
I have used colored pencils and Pitt pens and Sakura Gel pens.
Jeffro
The number one thing to remember: trump downplaying (even trying to hide it – remember the cruise ship he wouldn’t let unload passengers?) the virus in order to improve his re-election chances doomed any sort of unified response from the start.
Add to that Kushner’s idiocy about it only affecting big (blue) cities.
Anyway
@schrodingers_cat:
Very nice. So elegant. HNY to you.
opiejeanne
@gene108: Maybe we accepted it so easily because we both have had to personally deal with scary diseases, like Hepatitis C and cancer, and YY_Sima Qian’s daily reports from Hunan Province were so informative in AL’s daily Covid-19 column.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Jeffro: and, per J6 testimony, telling Birx and others to keep Biden and his team in the dark during the transition
Mel
@Amir Khalid: Happy New Year to you, Amir!
zhena gogolia
Thanks, Anne Laurie!
And Martin for talking me out of a train trip to Philadelphia in March 2020.
zhena gogolia
@schrodingers_cat: oh that’s lovely!
schrodingers_cat
@Anyway: Thanks!
I got my air fryer yesterday. Made tandoori chicken and roasted vegetables. Still learning the intricacies. The edges dried out a little bit which is something I will try to avoid. I have recalled a couple of air fryer books from the library. It has potential.
I am going to attempt eggplant bhajias today. Wish me luck!
Baud
@schrodingers_cat:
Nice. Happy New Year.
wvng
@Barbara: Yep, what Barbara said. Anne, your service has been extraordinary and necessary.
schrodingers_cat
@Baud:
@zhena gogolia:
Thanks!
More info, in case you are interested.
It was my 3rd attempt at a dark background. I have used metallics and neons which I seldom do
Plus I also used Magic Pencils by Kohinoor (3 leads in one pencil, I have the set of 5), they are pretty cool.
It is from Johanna Basford’s Enchanted forest.
Steeplejack
@Amir Khalid:
Happy New Year! 🎆
Kent
As a HS teacher, one of the things that still shocks me is the amount of learning loss that the current cohort of students went through during 1.5 or so years of largely remote learning. Schools around here closed mid-March 2020, stayed closed for a whole year, and then only started to re-open in hybrid fashion (2-3 times per week) in April 2021. But many kids never trickled back until fall 2021 or later.
This past fall I taught about half incoming freshman and half sophomores at a fairly diverse and lower socioeconomic school, so kids who spent their middle school years largely in lockdown and largely unsupervised. It is stunning how much basic “learning how to be a student” I had to teach them. As well as endless basic middle school stuff that in other years they would have come in already knowing such as the metric system, how to measure things, very basic algebra such as speed = distance/time. And just very basic critical thinking, reading, and writing skills.
It turns out that expecting students to teach themselves for nearly 2 years doesn’t work well.
What has also surprised me is how many kids seem to have been permanently lost to the public school system. Kids who just never came back. Some are homeschooling and such. But much of that is just sketchy as hell and little different from the pandemic remote learning that was such a failure. I don’t know what percentage of homeschool parents truly do it well, but the percentage is low and largely limited to the upper middle class and wealthy.
But many kids have basically just vanished and aren’t doing much at all. Staying home, looking after siblings, maybe doing a bit of home-schooling of some sort. But just basically invisible. That is not good.
gene108
@schrodingers_cat:
That’s beautiful
CaseyL
Another fervent, forever thanks to AL for this series. Anne, you’ve kept us informed and up to date for this very long (and still going!) slog. There have been a couple times that you’ve thought you could put the grind aside, when it looked like we might be out of it. I can’t imagine what it has felt like, having to take it up again.
I think the experts (like Faucci) had a pretty good idea of what would be coming down in terms of the mutability/variability.
I don’t think anyone could know just how bad the RW propaganda against established medical science and epidemiology would be, and how effective.
Frankensteinbeck
The biggest thing I was wrong about, which affected everything else, was conservative willingness to be vaccinated. I figured like a lot of things – like their threats to quit – they would make a big public noise, then act according to self-preservation like the chickenshit, hypocritical cowards they are. No, Covid hits just rarely enough, and in particular kills just rarely enough, they could let Cleek’s Law take over. TOTAL WAR, LIBERALS SUPPORT VACCINATION SO IT MUST BE EVIL…. and I Won’t Get It.
gene108
@opiejeanne:
I think people who’ve had health problems were much more accepting of the risks of COVID. I’ve gone through kidney failure. I’m under no illusions about always being in control of my health outcomes.
Sure Lurkalot
@Barbara:
Here’s a decent read on how the response to COVID and media coverage changed after the NYT and WP reported that outside of the elderly, COVID impacted black people disproportionately.
https://www.milwaukeeindependent.com/thom-hartmann/conservative-media-reacted-discovering-early-covid-deaths-people-color/
trollhattan
@Kent: Very concerning for those kids. Hard to guess how many simply went into the workforce and are still there, working retail, food service, etc. trapped in minimum wage hell.
Mine went to college the next year but that senior year gap can never be restored, as though that 12.5 years of her first 18 will always go unrecognized.
gene108
Anne Laurie, thanks not just for the COVID threads but keeping the blog running with all the content you provide, especially the reliable Morning threads.
kalakal
@schrodingers_cat: That’s lovely.
It’s very nice indeed! A Happy New Year to you
different-church-lady
@arrieve: Trump covers your second paragraph. Deplatforming Trump covers the third.
Gin & Tonic
Seeing here and there on Ukrainian Twitter: “Year in review: I did not die.”
mali muso
@Kent: @trollhattan: Definitely seeing it at the college level as well. Teaching is not my main job, but I do have a freshman seminar course every fall and have noticed a lack of basic adulting/life skills in the past two cohorts. It’s disconcerting. I mean, first-years are always a little green and naive but it’s like this batch missed some critical “finishing”.
stinger
@Amir Khalid: Happy New Year, Amir! Are you the first jackal in 2023?
different-church-lady
@Baud: “1. I blame Biden. What was the issue again?”
Cmorenc
@Alison Rose:
Huge overlap between the portion of the population susceptible to covid charlatans and the portion susceptible to Trump’s general snake oil.
different-church-lady
@Cmorenc: Two circles in perfect registration.
Another Scott
@arrieve: +1
In many ways, AIDS was the prototype for the US response here.
Helen is great and an amazing reporter on infectious disease. But she (apparently) left out the elephant in the room – politics. When monsters weaponize and tribalize disease to try to gain political advantage, science has few effective counters. That’s the big lesson here, I think, and we need to think really hard about how we fight it.
Cheers,
Scott.
rikyrah
AL,
I know when this began, you couldn’t have possibly believed that you would still be on this “beat” two years later.
But, I know, that you helped keep many of us safe until the vaccine came. Simply put, you helped save lives by the research and sharing of information about COVID.
THANK YOU🙏🏾🙏🏾
different-church-lady
@Gin & Tonic: Well, that lends some perspective.
rikyrah
@Amir Khalid:
Happy New Year👏🏾🌞
kalakal
I was genuinely shocked by how large numbers of the population were seen as expendable by their fellow citizens. I was surprised how easily employers were able, unlike in most of Western Europe, to prioritize their interests over the lives of their employees. In the UK there was, however flawed. a genuine attempt to put people before profit (a huge furlough scheme) that the populace, for the most part saw as a necessary evil. Here I was truly appalled at the willingness of many to endanger the poorest and most vulnerable eg meat packers rather than suffer inconvenience and the active hostility to mitigation measures. That and the rejection of science in favour of any grifting charlatan.
My experience is to some extent warped as I’m in Florida where the state government can only be described as murderous
Jeffro
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: absolutely!
they were out to kneecap President-elect Biden any way that they could. And it continued even after the inauguration – that’s when the GQP took a hard anti-vax turn.
One day a Republican Party (or Fox, or both) memo is going to surface, and it’ll show that they ran the numbers and decided that the net difference in GOP vs Dem Covid deaths would be worth it if it a) kept the GOP together after trump’s loss and b) kept pandemic recovery as slow as possible.
They couldn’t abide a nation returning swiftly to health and relative normality under a Democratic president.
stinger
@schrodingers_cat: That is beautiful!
Kelly
@Frankensteinbeck: The Covid specific right wing anti vax surprised the heck out of me. Oregon has long had a substantial anti vax population that had a bit of lefty lean. I expected the usual resistance. The vehemence and right wing lean was the surprise.
The mask resistance also surprised the heck out of me. A simple, cheap airborne microbe control method with a century of proof of effectiveness is a commie plot? WTF?
Thank You AL! You have been a great resource throughout this long strange trip.
Kent
Upper class and professional class kids are largely going to be OK because they had family support through the pandemic and after. But there are literally MILLIONS of kids from the lower classes and immigrant families who spent the pandemic home alone babysitting younger siblings or just basically being feral in the case of a lot of teen boys. Who basically got zero schooling.
My own three daughters are currently ages 16, 19, and 24. So they started the pandemic in 8th grade, 11th grade, and as a college senior. I quit my job and did full-time homeschooling during the pandemic with a learning pod composed of my 8th grade daughter and 3 of her friends who came to our house every single day. I’m a professional experienced teacher and even that was a tremendous challenge to keep the four of them on-track with constant adult supervision around the dining room table in our formal dining room that I completely converted into a classroom with every kind of supply including white boards.
Sister Golden Bear
@Suzanne: The other thing that’s resonating with me is the long essay on Russia’s dysfunctional culture, which was posted in the last night thread (two?) nights ago.
Obviously most of it doesn’t apply, but the image of Russians refusing to pick up their dog’s poop — because they didn’t give a shit about anything outside their home — seems all too similar to the Red State vax refuseniks. The common thread is in part a low-trust culture, albeit for very different reasons. Which was stoked by Trump in particular, but has existed for years within white cis-het grievance culture. Even more so, in that it’s not just “that’s the way things are,” a la Russia, but the insistence that anyone not like them is out to get them.
Kent
It wasn’t just anti-vax, it was anti-science.
Remember all the crazy ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine nonsense? The insistence that masks didn’t work?
My wife is a doctor and she had patients who literally DIED taking contraband horse dewormer from Tractor Supply rather than presenting themselves to the hospital. Of course they were also unvaccinated, but that was only the start of the anti-science delusion.
Or all the evangelical churches that turned themselves into plague incubators and killed thousands of their own members by refusing to take any simple and reasonable public health measures like masking and social distancing?
Kent
2022 Russia is literally the end point of MAGA culture.
Aussie Sheila
@kalakal: Yes even I was surprised at the casual brutality of US employers at that time. I specifically remember reading about meat packing plants, the sickness and deaths, and then the employers being allowed to speed up the line because the trump admin feared shortages.
Honestly the sheer brutality of US Labor regulation still has the capacity to shock, even after all the years of watching it and being made aware of it by US colleagues. It’s not just shocking, it’s also transmissible if we aren’t careful.
My whole working life many of us watched US trends and events knowing sooner or later they would come to us.
James E Powell
@Kent:
I taught HS for most of my career, but I’ve been teaching in middle school since the year before the pandemic. I am seeing exactly what you are seeing. Most especially the “how to be a student” and other basic things like show up, bring your chromebook, charge your chromebook at home. My school system pretty much decided that failing students would just not happen, so many students now regard the whole education thing as optional.
One long term benefit I hope comes out of this is that the pandemic and its consequences have forced to re-think a lot of what we are doing. The list is very long – I won’t bore you – but I believe that this is long overdue.
Another Scott
@Kent: And fishtank cleaner.
It was all a big game to TFG. He had/has a sociopathic/psycopathic desire to see how many people (who he actually regards as less than human) will kill themselves to show their devotion to anything he says. It played out during the insurrection (as someone points out downstairs).
Grrr…,
Scott.
Kelly
My son is a college graduate running a successful business. His wife, a stay at home Mom, converted one room into a classroom and held class for their 3 grade schoolers on the regular daily schedule their school had been on. Bought 2 different home school packages and anything else they thought would help.
Mrs Kelly’s son and his wife, high school graduates struggling financially kinda let the kids, nursey school through high school frosh, do as best they could. Distance, quarantine and a prickly relationship with Mrs Kelly’s daughter in law made helping them out impossible.
Kent
@Another Scott: Gargling bleach!
Chetan Murthy
@schrodingers_cat: Do you find the air fryer to be a big win over other ways of making those dishes? Just curious. I’m asking b/c I have limited counter space, and …. well, cheap-ass b5d that I am, I don’t want to buy appliances unless I’m gonna use ’em ….
But if an air fryer is a big win …..
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Another Scott: I’ve mentioned before that Mr DAW used to work with the husband in that couple, the guy who died. They were both at John Deere engineering in Waterloo, IA at the time
trollhattan
@Aussie Sheila: We have a federal OSHA–Occupational Safety and Health Administration–that has been gelded to such an extent that employers do not fear them and when they are caught practicing poor and dangerous safety practices, issue fines that represent a few minutes of profit at most.
Kent
Since the pandemic I’ve been mostly doing long-term science subbing at two different districts here in the Camas/Vancouver area so I bounce around between poorer and richer schools. The disparity cannot be more stark and it is far wider today in 2023 than it ever was pre-pandemic.
The kids at the wealthy schools where I teach are packed into AP classes and other advanced stuff at as high or higher ratios as ever. My 11th grade daughter attends the most affluent school in our region and the works she does is exceptionally rigorous in both her AP and non-AP classes (as a junior she is in 4 AP classes)
By contrast, the majority-minority school in the poorer side of town where I spent all fall teaching science is a complete mess. would venture to say that the disparity between the two schools is greater than it has ever been and that is largely due to the pandemic and the school system’s response to it. The lack of accountability and standards is just breathtaking.
Another Scott
@Dorothy A. Winsor: I had forgotten that.
It’s a small world. :-(
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
Chetan Murthy
@Gin & Tonic: From time-to-time, I think about something I once read about people in wartime: which might be summed up by that great poet David Byrne:
and I think to myself about all the ways in which we all look to our future lives, our expectations for the future. Sometimes those expectations are that things will get better, sometimes that they’ll get worse. But we all have expectations about what our lives will be like a year from now.
And the thing about life during wartime (and especially for soldiers) is that …. they don’t. They can’t, b/c it could be snuffed out tomorrow. I don’t know how they do it. Obviously humans have been doing it for hundreds of millennia, but still ….
Chetan Murthy
@rikyrah: I want to add my thanks, AL. You taught us, helped us from feeling isolated in our fear, and gave us headlights, every day, about what to expect, how to respond.
bjacques
@Alison Rose: I have a cartoon from about 1800 mocking Dr. Edward Jenner, credited until recently as introducing smallpox vaccination. Anti-vaxxers are not new. Here’s a version in color:
https://www.pariscityart.com/shop/listing/gare-la-vaccine-triomphe-de-la-petite-verole/763
WereBear
@bjacques: It’s always been about the anti-science. I don’t understand how medieval attitudes persist for centuries, but unless we challenge them, they never will fad.
Chetan Murthy
@bjacques: Oh wow, that’s brilliant! Thank you for sharing that!
Also: 150euro ? Oy.
Amir Khalid
@stinger:
Along with Aussie Sheila and Viva Brisvegas, yes.
Ksmiami
@rikyrah: Seconded. Her posts were an effective counter to the waves of BS. I still think as a democracy, we need to be able to hold liars and their sociopathic bosses to account- that means the Fox ecosystem. Sue them into bankruptcy.
rikyrah
@schrodingers_cat:
Another air fryer convert!😎
Yeah👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾
Just gotta do trial and error while you learn how to cook your favorites
rikyrah
@kalakal:
One of these days, we need to discuss the White Supremacy basis of the Dolt45 COVID response.
Chetan Murthy
@rikyrah: rikyrah, so you’re an air fryer aficionado as well? So … I have a brand-new oven (huzzah! owner-occupied rental housing! Huzzah! Love my landlords! Huzzah! (how many renters can say that?)) and it works great.
Is there really that much of a win, with an air fryer? I never fry things in oil, b/c “oil”. Maybe I would use it for that?
Citizen Alan
What surprised me most was that the moral depravity of Republicans was even worse than I’d imagined. Even at my most pessimistic and cynical, I never dreamed that the Republicans would actively try to undermine pandemic response because they gambled that it would kill off Democratic constituencies faster than Republican constituencies. I’ve thought the GOP was evil for years, but now, I consider the whole party nothing but a death cult. The Manson Family but 80 million strong.
WereBear
@Citizen Alan: Likewise, I referred to it as a Republican Death Cult since Trump won.
Self-frickin-evident
Chetan Murthy
@Citizen Alan: I want to write that what surprised me was something negative, and usually I harp on that sort of thing.
But truthfully, I remember, I REMEMBER when I called my mom (who was a mile away, quarantining with my sister&her-BF), and I literally hadn’t hugged her in over a year) and told her “we’re going to live, Mom, we’re going to live: we just need to make it a couple more months thru the shots, and we’ll LIVE!”
The researchers, doctors, nurses, who kept us alive, and then invented magic juice to save our lives so damn *quickly*, were the biggest surprise. I was listening to Dr. Fauci, who told us that if we got a 60% effective vaccine in 18mos, that’d be a triumph. And instead, we got …. well, we got a miracle.
Science!
Cacti
The pandemic ruthlessly exposed every structural weakness of 21st century American life.
And we haven’t really fixed any of them.
kalakal
@rikyrah: Indeed we do. Early on in the pandemic I watched in horror a broadcast/interviews from GA. The interviewees were all whining about the tiniest mitigation efforts ( reduced capacity in restaurants) because “it’s not affecting us”. This was while they were being shown stuff from a few miles down the road of people suffering and dying. As well as the sheer stupidity ( pandemics spread, just because it’s not in your area today means nothing about tomorrow) it was the callous indifference. The “Why should we inconvenienced in order to save the lives of others? “. All the interviewees were notably much lighter complexioned than those dying. Those bastards really thought being able to get a haircut more important than saving people’s lives as they saw those dying as not being important. As a display of pure racism it was disgusting, it was sheer indifference to the wellbeing of people they considered unimportant, not worthy of care, valueless.
Mike in NC
We’ll soon be subjected to unlimited Republican House stupidity, perhaps a drive to punish Dr Fauci and take away his pension.
After all, a few years ago we had an imbecile in the White House who was so hostile to science that he encouraged people to drink bleach, and he fully supported heavily armed goons showing up at state houses to protest mask wearing.
Chetan Murthy
@kalakal: @rikyrah: Yes, this. And even in the Blue areas, the pandemic was really “white/rich people hole up in their houses learning how to make sourdough while poor/people-of-color bring them stuff”. I remember how, when schools started reopening, it was people of color who insisted on greater covid mitigations, b/c they didn’t want their kids getting infected, bringing it home to their families, killing their grandparents.
Ruckus
@Suzanne:
That left us trying to appeal to their better angels, and that will never work.
Appealing to something many don’t have is why it doesn’t work. Humanity is still a dog eat dog proposition, especially since this country decided (secretly maybe? or seemingly) that money is the most important thing ever. And sure having money is better than being broke but the Forbes 400 is now all billionaires. Scrooge McDuckitus has taken over. It’s no longer a goal just to be “comfortable,” we have to be more “comfortable” than everyone else, or at least a sizable proportion of the citizens do.
schrodingers_cat
@rikyrah: I have started making notes. Your enthusiastic embrace of the air fryer definitely played a part in my decision to purchase the device. I am keeping notes of what works and what doesn’t.
So far I have made:
Tandoori chicken thighs
Chicken kebabs
Eggplant bhajia
Onion bhajia
Batata bhaji (potatoes cooked in oil flavored with mustard seeds, green chili, curry leaves, red onion and turmeric.
@Chetan Murthy: It has potential, I am not working with any recipes just seat of the pants cooking, so some of my experiments have worked well and some need tweaking.
The onion bhajia and the potatoes were winners
The eggplant bhajia and chicken were good but not great
I am planning to revive my blog and I will post more about my experiments there.
kalakal
@schrodingers_cat:
You may have just persueded me to get an air fryer. I adore onion bhajia
Ruckus
@arrieve:
Some people want the world to be perfect, to make sense to them, and it isn’t and doesn’t. It might never either because their expectations are un-fillable, unrealistic, impossible. In this country we’ve been told that this is the greatest country on the planet. And while it may be that, it does have it’s faults, all of them human faults. And in my eighth decade, I’ve yet to met a perfect human. I’ve known some that look perfect, some that are closer to it than others, and while most of us aren’t even close, some are so far from any definition of perfect that they couldn’t find it with the Hubble Telescope.
schrodingers_cat
@kalakal: It took only a tsp of oil that I put in the batter.
Chetan Murthy
@schrodingers_cat: I read that an air fryer is a small convection oven, and wonder: can these things not be made in an oven ? Perhaps turning the heat up higher on the oven to get faster cooking of the outside ?
kalakal
@schrodingers_cat: That is impressive, so much better
James E Powell
@Kent:
Agreed. It’s very hard to explain to people who do not work in the business.
The main driver of “reform” efforts in the 21st century has been “Hey, this might be a way destroy teachers’ unions.”
I’m convinced that people generally [#notallpeople – don’t @ me!] do not give a rat’s ass about how well other people’s children are educated and they most definitely do not wish to pay for it.
I am retiring from LAUSD effective June 30 and will look for a sub job in the Inland Empire to have something to do. After 17 years in this business, I am more discouraged than ever.
schrodingers_cat
@Chetan Murthy: It is smaller and more powerful, so its quicker. Yes technically you can use your oven for most of the stuff you would do in the air fryer.
Suzanne
@Sister Golden Bear: Agree with you 100%.
I was not surprised in the slightest to see so many people refuse to take public health measures like masking, distancing, vaxxing. Honestly, I would have been surprised if people had followed them. Maybe I just have a lower opinion of my fellow citizens, but I was like, “These is no way in hell this will work, short of backing up a money truck to the house of everyone age 50 and younger”.
The fundamental dynamic that we could just not surmount was that we needed relatively lower-risk people to sacrifice on behalf of those who were at higher risk. And lots of people do not have that mindset, and are unwilling to make sacrifices for others, and I don’t think we (royal societal we) tried hard enough to change their behavior.
sab
@schrodingers_cat: Would it be cooler and cleaner come summer? This time of year in our underheated house I welcome every opportunity to turn on the oven. Not so much in July.
Ruckus
@gene108:
THIS. As we get older and almost always have issues, of getting old if nothing else, we should be able to recognize that sometimes, life is going to crap on us. It isn’t often that it does this to everyone at the same time, but if you are old enough (and many of us on here are) you went through childhood getting diseases that we mostly no longer hear about, at least day to day. The were common diseases to those of us old enough, polio, measles, chicken pox, encephalitis, etc did not have vaccines when I was a kid, and some things like shingles vaccines did not come along until this century. And take it from me, from experience, you – do – not – want shingles, not in any way, shape or form.
sab
@Suzanne: In my small Ohio city the kids don’t mask and a lot of the olds do. We olds sort of have a camaraderie now. Masked people I have never even talked to smile and wave at me in the grocery because I too am masked. Kinda of reverse MAGA hat effect.
Ruckus
@Kelly:
It must be me but I saw it clearly. The vast majority of citizens has at best a murky concept of science, especially health science. A lot of teaching is about how to get ahead rather than concrete scientific knowledge and a lot of people do not get or have the drive to work at learning. If nothing else they want instant gratification and that seldom is any kind of reward in life, because it often disappears as fast as it shows up, hence that word, instant.
sab
With my stepkids and their friends, I have been really struck by how many life skills the more prosperous thirty-to-forty year olds never learned. Stuff we all knew. I am a 68 year old woman but I have known how to change a tire and jump-start a car since I learned how to drive.
I am not restaurant level competent but I am a pretty good cook.
My working class stepkids have all these lifeskills. My more successful stepkid and his significant other don’t. It’s shocking to me. They learned a lot this year.
Baking homemade bread is a pain, but I learned how when i was twelve.
Ruckus
@Kent:
2022 Russia is literally the end point of MAGA culture.
THIS. One thousand percent this.
Ruckus
@Chetan Murthy:
Wait till you get up there in age. I want to make 100 just because it seems better than not doing so. But I recognize that age always wins eventually and the older you get the more it lets you know your age. I went through a 2 yr period 2017-2019 where 14 people I know died. Only one of them was older than me and he was the first of the 14. He was one yr older. Exercise. Exercise. Exercise. It doesn’t have to be like practice for the Olympics, just mild exercise. Walk, maybe some easy calisthenics. Stay as active as you can and feel comfortable.
Ruckus
@James E Powell:
We are humans. We change slowly, unless we are trying to do the stupid thing and then we can change at the drop of a hat. Into worse. Some want to learn, many do not give a rats ass. As it always has been and likely always will be. It might be that due to faster, broader communications we will be able to go backwards even faster.
schrodingers_cat
@sab: Yes definitely, I hate starting the oven in July.
Chetan Murthy
@Ruckus: I’m turning 58 soon, and hooboy, “Exercise, Exercise, Exercise” indeed. When I was young I did it for the endorphins; now I do it for that, but also b/c I don’t wanna fall and break a bone someday. Doing a ton of lower-body exercise (Adam Silverman: “Never skip leg day!”) these days.
Been thinking of going to the local climbing gym and learning how to boulder, since I hear that that’s a real workout, and (one presumes) should prepare one for, y’know, not tripping-and-falling.
cain
@James E Powell: I was reading that the country needs 300k teachers to keep our public education going – and thanks to all the pandemic stuff – teachers are going to be in short supply.
2023 and onwards we are going to be seeing a lot of issues. Everything is expensive and the current teacher salary is not enough to live on – to pay rent, to send kids to school – it’s a shit show.
LiminalOwl
@Amir Khalid: Happy New Year!
@Anne Laurie: I am chiming in late once again but yes, thank you very much for keeping us informed. I have found your work such a valuable resource, these three years.
LiminalOwl
@JPL: Yes. I keep thinking about the first death that touched me personally. Almost exactly three years ago…
tybee
@Barbara:
i concur.