K: The Overlooked Variable That's Driving the Pandemic theatlantic.com

A growing number of studies estimate that a majority of infected people may not infect a single other person. A recent paper found that in Hong Kong, which had extensive testing and contact tracing, about 19 percent of cases were responsible for 80 percent of transmission, while 69 percent of cases did not infect another person. This finding is not rare: Multiple studies from the beginning have suggested that as few as 10 to 20 percent of infected people may be responsible for as much as 80 to 90 percent of transmission, and that many people barely transmit it.

How to Escape From a Volcano Eruption wired.com

Let's say you were visiting the Roman town of Pompeii on the morning of August 24, 79 AD. And let’s say you arrived sometime between the hours of 9 and 10 am. That should give you enough time to explore the port town and maybe even grab a loaf of bread at the local bakery (see map below for directions). But it would also put you in Pompeii in time to experience a 5.9 magnitude earthquake, the first of many, and watch the black cloud rise from Mount Vesuvius as the mountain began to erupt 1.5 million tons of molten rock per second and release 100,000 times the thermal energy of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. All while you were standing a mere 6 miles away.

Aerial views of London: then and now theguardian.com

Marking the 15-year anniversary of the New London Architecture galleries, the Changing Face of London revisits its 2005 exhibition to capture the transformation of the city’s famous landmarks.

Oliver Burkeman's last column: the eight secrets to a (fairly) fulfilled life theguardian.com

Major personal decisions should be made not by asking, “Will this make me happy?”, but “Will this choice enlarge me or diminish me?” We’re terrible at predicting what will make us happy: the question swiftly gets bogged down in our narrow preferences for security and control. But the enlargement question elicits a deeper, intuitive response. You tend to just know whether, say, leaving or remaining in a relationship or a job, though it might bring short-term comfort, would mean cheating yourself of growth. (Relatedly, don’t worry about burning bridges: irreversible decisions tend to be more satisfying, because now there’s only one direction to travel – forward into whatever choice you made.)

They Know How to Prevent Megafires. Why Won’t Anybody Listen? propublica.org

We dug ourselves into a deep, dangerous fuel imbalance due to one simple fact. We live in a Mediterranean climate that’s designed to burn, and we’ve prevented it from burning anywhere close to enough for well over a hundred years. Now climate change has made it hotter and drier than ever before, and the fire we’ve been forestalling is going to happen, fast, whether we plan for it or not. [...] When I reached Malcolm North, a research ecologist with the U.S. Forest Service who is based in Mammoth, California, and asked if there was any meaningful scientific dissent to the idea that we need to do more controlled burning, he said, “None that I know of.”

We won’t remember much of what we did in the pandemic timharford.com

The Covid-19 lockdown, after all, was full of new experiences. Some were grim: I lost a friend to the disease; I smashed my face up in an accident; we had to wear masks and avoid physical contact and worry about where the next roll of toilet paper was coming from. Some were more positive: the discovery of new pleasures, the honing of new skills, the overcoming of new challenges. But I doubt I am alone in finding that my memory of the lockdown months is rather thin. No matter how many new people or old friends you talk to on Zoom or Skype, they all start to smear together because the physical context is monotonous: the conversations take place while one sits in the same chair, in the same room, staring at the same computer screen.

The Battle to Invent the Automatic Rice Cooker atlasobscura.com

It would take a Toshiba salesman to make that happen. In the early 1950s, Shogo Yamada traveled Japan promoting Toshiba’s electric washing machine. Along the way, he asked housewives about their most onerous task. Their answer was cooking rice three times a day, which in some parts of the country was still undertaken with a kamado. When a down-on-his luck maker of water heaters, Yoshitada Minami, came to him looking for work, Yamada passed the project on to him. And since cooking rice was women’s work, Minami passed much of the research on to his wife, Fumiko.

What You Can No Longer Say in Hong Kong nytimes.com

They carry blank signs or ones with coded messages. They play protest songs but without lyrics.

It’s very hard to tear down a bridge once it’s up gothamist.com

I remember his aide, Sid Shapiro, who I spent a lot of time getting to talk to me, he finally talked to me. And he had this quote that I’ve never forgotten. He said Moses didn’t want poor people, particularly poor people of color, to use Jones Beach, so they had legislation passed forbidding the use of buses on parkways. Then he had this quote, and I can still hear him saying it to me. “Legislation can always be changed. It’s very hard to tear down a bridge once it’s up.” So he built 180 or 170 bridges too low for buses.

The rise, fall, and rise of the status pineapple bbc.co.uk

By the 1770s, "a pineapple of the finest flavour" became a phrase used for anything that was the best of the best. It's played upon in Sheridan's 1775 play The Rivals, when Mrs Malaprop confuses the word with "pinnacle" and exclaims: "He is the very pineapple of politeness!".

Oatly: The New Coke divinations.substack.com

“Plant-based,” “low in saturated fat,” “GMO-free,” these are all true things about Oatly, but they don’t mean it’s not bad for you. “we specifically chose rapeseed/canola oil for our products due to its great nutritional profile (low in saturated fats, rich in unsaturated fats, and higher in omega-3 fatty acids than most other oils).“ Those are all true things about canola oil, but they don’t mean it’s good for you.

Why Britain Failed Its Coronavirus Test theatlantic.com

“People will look back and say, ‘Could we have done it earlier?’ and with the power of retrospectroscope, which is an infinitely powerful instrument, the answer to that is, probably,” Mark Walport, who like Boyd sits on SAGE, told me. But Walport said this was not the fundamental issue of the crisis. “Many of the challenges that we’ve had are not, as it were, about policy advice or the science advice; they are questions about resilience.” […] If Britain is to solve them, it needs to up its game or be left behind; to realize it is no longer “world leading” in as many fields as it thinks, and that its problems run far deeper than whichever crop of politicians is in charge. “The really important question,” Boyd said, “is whether the state, in its current form, is structurally capable of delivering on the big-picture items that are coming, whether pandemics or climate change or anything else.”

The Four Quadrants of Conformism paulgraham.com

The ones who are aggressively conventional-minded today would have been aggressively conventional-minded then too. In other words, that they'd not only not have fought against slavery, but that they'd have been among its staunchest defenders. I'm biased, I admit, but it seems to me that aggressively conventional-minded people are responsible for a disproportionate amount of the trouble in the world, and that a lot of the customs we've evolved since the Enlightenment have been designed to protect the rest of us from them. In particular, the retirement of the concept of heresy and its replacement by the principle of freely debating all sorts of different ideas, even ones that are currently considered unacceptable, without any punishment for those who try them out to see if they work.

Crows are watching your language, literally corvidresearch.blog

As with the carrion crow study, when these crows were presented with playback of a more familiar acoustic style—in this case a Japanese speaker—they didn’t show a strong reaction. Play them what was likely a completely unfamiliar language—Dutch—and the crows were rapt. Or at least they acted more vigilant and positioned themselves closer to the speaker. In other words, large-billed crows were able to discriminate between human languages without any prior training!

How Giant Ships Are Built nytimes.com

As container ships go, the Matsonia is modest in size. But size is relative in shipping. Once it is seaworthy, likely by the end of the year, the Matsonia will stretch the length of more than two football fields and be capable of carrying thousands of 20-foot-long containers and 500 cars and trucks — as much as 57,400 tons of cargo in total.

Amid the George Floyd protests, imagining the nonviolent state vox.com

This is the often neglected heart of nonviolence: It is a strategic confrontation with other human beings. It takes as self-evident that we must continue to live in fellowship with one another. As such, it puts changing each other’s hearts at the center of political action, and then asks what kind of action is likeliest to bring about that transformation. That its answers are radical and demanding does not make them untrue. “King thinks human beings are sacred,” says Brandon Terry, a Harvard sociologist and co-author of a volume on King’s political philosophy. “We need, above all else, to avoid preventing them from changing for the better. That’s what the whole ethos is about: trying to see in other people what we see in ourselves — the capacity for growth, self-correction, and change.”

Functional fixedness en.wikipedia.org

For example, if someone needs a paperweight, but they only have a hammer, they may not see how the hammer can be used as a paperweight. Functional fixedness is this inability to see a hammer's use as anything other than for pounding nails; the person couldn't think to use the hammer in a way other than in its conventional function.

Jon Stewart is back to weigh in nytimes.com

The rally wasn’t about being civil. It was about being precise. The intention was not to suggest that negative things don’t exist or that you shouldn’t fight them, but to be as precise as you can.

A White Woman, Racism and a Poodle franklywrite.com

There were plenty of times black men pulled up next to me when Merlin was in the passenger seat and said, “Hey, a brother dog.” I should have known. John Steinbeck wrote in “Travels with Charley,” Charley was also a Poodle, that he had to be careful driving in the South. He got in trouble a few times because people thought Charlie was a black man. How could I be so stupid! I stood behind my van with Merlin in the passenger seat and could see how he was mistaken for a black man. I wish I had a photograph. This happened to me 5 times in the span of about a year. I cannot imagine having it happen several times a week my entire life. As a white woman, getting stopped by the police is scary; it makes my heart race and my stomach hurt. I’m sure a black person’s fear and rage is a hundred times greater.

The Pandemic Isn’t a Black Swan but a Portent of a More Fragile Global System newyorker.com

The coming of global information networks deepened Taleb’s concern. [...] As Taleb told me, “The great danger has always been too much connectivity.” Proliferating global networks, both physical and virtual, inevitably incorporate more fat-tail risks into a more interdependent and “fragile” system: not only risks such as pathogens but also computer viruses, or the hacking of information networks, or reckless budgetary management by financial institutions or state governments, or spectacular acts of terror. Any negative event along these lines can create a rolling, widening collapse—a true black swan—in the same way that the failure of a single transformer can collapse an electricity grid.

How Italians Became ‘White’ nytimes.com

The federal holiday honoring the Italian explorer Christopher Columbus — celebrated on Monday — was central to the process through which Italian-Americans were fully ratified as white during the 20th century. The rationale for the holiday was steeped in myth, and allowed Italian-Americans to write a laudatory portrait of themselves into the civic record. Few who march in Columbus Day parades or recount the tale of Columbus’s voyage from Europe to the New World are aware of how the holiday came about or that President Benjamin Harrison proclaimed it as a one-time national celebration in 1892 — in the wake of a bloody New Orleans lynching that took the lives of 11 Italian immigrants. The proclamation was part of a broader attempt to quiet outrage among Italian-Americans, and a diplomatic blowup over the murders that brought Italy and the United States to the brink of war.

Why Are the Police in Charge of Road Safety? marginalrevolution.com

Defunding the police, whatever that means, is a political non-starter. But we can unbundle the police.

How Apples Go Bad newyorker.com

The closer an apple is to rot, the more rot it spreads—one spoiling apple, in a crisper drawer or a fruit bowl, or a storage barrel or a cross-country shipping container, or even still hanging on the bough, speeds the rot of every apple it touches, and even of ones it doesn’t touch.

Are your tinned tomatoes picked by slave labour? theguardian.com

Inside the camp, there are shops selling everything: iPhone chargers, bracelets, sim cards, bread, crisps, hair extensions, bike pumps and shoes. Vendors are roasting pieces of meat coated in a thick marinade and heckling passers-by. There’s a group of men intently watching a game of draughts. Restaurants in shacks advertise their menus: “The best taste of The Gambia”. There’s a club lined with discoloured sofas and afrobeat blaring from the stereo. Another restaurant doubles as a brothel. But there is no running water or formal sanitation facilities anywhere.

Seeing Through Police nplusonemag.com

Perhaps police ought not to exist, thinking theoretically, since their behavior is inadequately supported by the democratic social order’s explicit justifications. Yet they must exist, practically — despite their errors — precisely because they have proved themselves in democracy as both “first responders” and a “last resort,” a mobilization of nondefinition and nonfixity for all sorts of situations. [...] Suppose we say this: Police are negotiators, but without access to contract, law, or eloquence. Their medium is not law. They do not always use memorable or wholly coherent words. Usually they confront situations of conflict they did not cause, but which they are required to enter as third parties. There, they become deliberately distracting, grandstanding observers, turning the attention of other parties away from each other and toward themselves. When you look at them this way, focusing on the middle range between space-holding inaction and violent attack, you can see how negotiating is actually what the police do unendingly, habitually — but unfamiliarly, because in some way they refuse to recognize or care about the original goals of the relevant parties. They bring a separate set of criteria to bear, and not always an appealing one. Is this chargeable? Should this person be removed or transported temporarily? How soon can I leave, and how do I scare these citizens a bit so they won’t come into conflict again and police won’t need to come back?

We often accuse the right of distorting science. But the left changed the coronavirus narrative overnight theguardian.com

Two weeks ago we shamed people for being in the street; today we shame them for not being in the street. As a result of lockdowns and quarantines, many millions of people around the world have lost their jobs, depleted their savings, missed funerals of loved ones, postponed cancer screenings and generally put their lives on hold for the indefinite future. They accepted these sacrifices as awful but necessary when confronted by an otherwise unstoppable virus. Was this or wasn’t this all an exercise in futility?

The ‘greatest film-maker who ever lived’ bbc.com

Bergman associates a lack of love with a loss of meaning. When we are loveless, the world appears to us as dull and deformed; when our love is unrequited, it mutates into spite and contempt. For Bergman, love is a form of protective care, a balm that soothes and sustains. Love involves a partial abandonment of the self: the greatest privilege is “to be allowed to live for someone else”, in the words of Tomas’ longsuffering parishioner. [...] Bergman once remarked that death is “a very, very wise arrangement” – it offers a bookend to our lives, which we can infuse with meaning through love. There is suffering in the world, and we must try to comprehend it, even in its senselessness, but above all we must seek to mitigate it with mercy and generosity. Bergman would like us to remember Agnes’s diary entry: “I have received the best gift anyone could have in this life. The gift has many names: affinity, fellowship, human contact, affection. I believe this is what is called grace”.

Forty-Five Things I Learned in the Gulag theparisreview.org

1. The extreme fragility of human culture, civilization. A man becomes a beast in three weeks, given heavy labor, cold, hunger, and beatings. 2. I understood why people do not live on hope — there isn’t any hope. Nor can they survive by means of free will — what free will is there? They live by instinct, a feeling of self-preservation, on the same basis as a tree, a stone, an animal. 3. I discovered that the world should be divided not into good and bad people but into cowards and non-cowards. Ninety-five percent of cowards are capable of the vilest things, lethal things, at the mildest threat.

Carcinisation: one of the many attempts of Nature to evolve a crab en.wikipedia.org

Carcinisation (or carcinization) is an example of convergent evolution in which a crustacean evolves into a crab-like form from a non-crab-like form

Horseradish History horseradish.org

During the Renaissance, horseradish consumption spread from Central Europe northward to Scandinavia and westward to England. It wasn’t until 1640, however, that the British ate horseradish — and then it was consumed only by country folk and laborers. By the late 1600s, horseradish was the standard accompaniment for beef and oysters among all Englishmen. The English, in fact, grew the pungent root at inns and coach stations, to make cordials to revive exhausted travelers.

Identities write.as

We're connected to (literally) an entire world of people on the internet, an entirely new — yet not all that different — experience. Instead of having every online service expect us to socialize as our one “true” identity, it should be easy to have a distinct, private identity for each online situation. Your conversations with friends should be private enough that your family or boss doesn't see them. Your published thoughts should only be seen by who you want. You should be able to speak your mind.

The Coronavirus Quieted City Noise. Listen to What’s Left. nytimes.com

Days sound more like nights

Now Is the Time to Cherish the Little Things, by Jeff Bezos newyorker.com

I can’t tell you how good it felt to use my creativity to solve a problem and take up a new hobby. I mixed the dough together and was totally amazed at how the yeast kept expanding it. The longer it sat there, the more it grew, seemingly swallowing everything around it. For a minute, I thought it was getting way too big. LOL. Like that’s a thing. Then I baked it. It wasn’t the most perfect loaf—who among us has ever been in their kitchen?—but, hey, it was good enough. And that’s my message to you.

Is Ronan Farrow Too Good to Be True? nytimes.com

We are living in an era of conspiracies and dangerous untruths — many pushed by President Trump, but others hyped by his enemies — that have lured ordinary Americans into passionately believing wild and unfounded theories and fiercely rejecting evidence to the contrary. The best reporting tries to capture the most attainable version of the truth, with clarity and humility about what we don’t know. Instead, Mr. Farrow told us what we wanted to believe about the way power works, and now, it seems, he and his publicity team are not even pretending to know if it’s true.

The world is on lockdown. So where are all the carbon emissions coming from? grist.org

Pedestrians have taken over city streets, people have almost entirely stopped flying, skies are blue (even in Los Angeles!) for the first time in decades, and global CO2 emissions are on-track to drop by … about 5.5 percent.

68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice kk.org

I’m positive that in 100 years much of what I take to be true today will be proved to be wrong, maybe even embarrassingly wrong, and I try really hard to identify what it is that I am wrong about today.

Winston Churchill received a prescription for alcohol to get around American Prohibition twitter.com

The quantity is naturally infinite

During a Pandemic, ‘How Are You?’ Is a Bad Question theatlantic.com

Tannen points out that in certain parts of Asia, a common greeting exchange goes something like “Have you eaten yet?” “Yes, I’ve eaten rice.”

Complexity Has to Live Somewhere ferd.ca

In The Design of Everyday Things, Don Norman mentions the concept of "Knowledge in the head" and "knowledge in the world" (similar concepts are more academically presented in Roesler & Woods' Designing for Expertise). Knowledge in the head are things you know, that you have learned, that are in your memory. Knowledge in the world is everything else: information written down, cues in design (you know the power button by looking at its symbol, and you know it can be pressed because it looks like a button). One tricky thing is that interpretation of knowledge in the world is both cultural and contextual, and relies on knowledge in the head (you know the power button can be pressed because you know what a button is in the first place).

This Focaccia Isn’t Your Garden-Variety Flatbread nytimes.com

For some, sourdough is the baking king of social media. For others, there are these beautifully decorated focaccia, dotted with vegetables.

“Who’s Laughing Now, Assholes?” A Letter from Henry David Thoreau to Literature Faculties at Cushy Liberal Arts Schools mcsweeneys.net

Don’t play dumb, bruh. You’ve spent most of your short career trash talking me. Every damn fall, you tell your first-year Am Lit seminar that I’m completely full of shit. You stand there in your goddamned tweed jacket with the suede elbow patches, and tell the kids how my experiment in self-reliance was all just a sham. Then you angle your head just so, and say something snarky about “performative solitude” or “cabin porn.” And for the coup de grâce, you proclaim that I was never really alone at Walden Pond, because I had regular visitors.

Non uscire dalla stanza paolonori.it

Non uscire dalla stanza; pensa di essere malato. Cosa c’è, al mondo, di più bello, di un muro scrostato? Perché andar via da dove tornerai, dopo, di sera, uguale a come eri e, in più, intossicato?

Taleb: The Only Man Who Has A Clue nakedcapitalism.com

General Precautionary Principle : The general (non-naive) precautionary principle [3] delineates conditions where actions must be taken to reduce risk of ruin, and traditional cost-benefit analyses must not be used. These are ruin problems where, over time, exposure to tail events leads to a certain eventual extinction. While there is a very high probability for humanity surviving a single such event, over time, there is eventually zero probability of surviving repeated exposures to such events. While repeated risks can be taken by individuals with a limited life expectancy, ruin exposures must never be taken at the systemic and collective level. In technical terms, the precautionary principle applies when traditional statistical averages are invalid because risks are not ergodic.

A (possible) solution to COVID-19 tillett.info

This data suggests a simple and testable hypothesis – there are natural strains of SARS-CoV-2 in the world that have mutated to be non-pathogenic (asymptomatic or mild), but are still infective and will provide immunity to the more pathogenic (deadly) strains. If we can find one of these non-pathogenic viral strains out in the wild we could give it to everyone in the world and solve our diabolic problem. This non-pathogenic strain would act much like the live attenuated (oral) polio vaccine.

Sourdough, Status, and Self-Isolation maxpolicy.substack.com

The thing about conspicuous leisure is you can’t demonstrate your status simply by lying around — that would make it too hard to distinguish you from any other bum or layabout. No, to properly show that you are a member of the leisure class, you must disguise your leisure in a way that makes it seem productive or useful, without it actually being so. And the best way to do that is to engage in pursuits that were once functional but are now vestigial, which is why (when he was writing in 1899) the leisured aristocracy demonstrated its status by engaging in things like fox hunting, learning swordplay, or learning obscure languages.

How to Make a Face Mask With Fabric nytimes.com

A tutorial on how to make your own fabric face mask from common household materials.

No-Sew Pleated Face Mask with Handkerchief and Hair Tie blog.japanesecreations.com

No cutting or sewing is required

The Great Empty nytimes.com

DURING THE 1950S, New York’s Museum of Modern Art organized a famous photo exhibition called “The Family of Man.” In the wake of a world war, the show, chockablock with pictures of people, celebrated humanity’s cacophony, resilience and common bond. Today a different global calamity has made scarcity the necessary condition of humanity’s survival. Cafes along the Navigli in Milan hunker behind shutters along with the Milanese who used to sip aperos beside the canal. Times Square is a ghost town, as are the City of London and the Place de la Concorde in Paris during what used to be the morning rush.

Keep Paddling erickarjaluoto.com

Have you ever canoed into big waves? If so, you know that stopping is not the answer (unless you want to flip the canoe). If you want to stay afloat, you keep paddling, just like you did before. If you run a small business, you must act prudently. That might mean cutting any costs that don’t generate revenue. Beyond that, though, I’d ask you to act with the same clear-headedness that you did before this crisis. Don’t panic. Don’t go into the fetal position. Don’t do anything rash. Pause for a moment, take a breath, and assess the situation.

What We Can Learn (and Should Unlearn) From Albert Camus's The Plague lithub.com

“There have been as many plagues as wars in history,” Camus writes. “Yet always plagues and wars take people equally by surprise.”

Coronavirus Response: Americans Will Come to Rely on Big Business bloomberg.com

Larger businesses are also easier to assist if necessary. Whatever you think of the forthcoming bailout of the major U.S. airlines, logistically it will not be very difficult to pull off, since the targets are large and obvious and relatively easy to monitor. Banks are willing to lend to them, because they know the government does not contemplate a world without major airlines. It is much more difficult to bail out the millions of small and medium-sized enterprises around the world that will demand assistance. How do you find and track them? How can you tell which have no chance of bouncing back? Government bureaucracies cannot easily deal with those problems, and in turn private banks do not perceive governments to be making credible commitments to these small businesses. By contrast, there are numerous precedents for governmental aid or loans to airlines or other major businesses.

The End Is Coming thepointmag.com

For a long time, philosophy and the other humanistic disciplines have been concerned with how to achieve advances that might mirror those of the sciences. But it will not be through science that we come to reconcile ourselves to the fact that unlimited scientific progress is impossible. The humanist was never really in the business of making progress. Her job is to acquire and transmit a grasp of the intrinsic value of the human experience; this is a job whose difficulty and importance rises in proportion to the awareness that all of it will be lost. It is the humanist’s task to ensure that, if and when the infertility scenario should arise, things will not stop mattering to people. We must become the specialists of finitude, the experts in loss, the scientists of tragedy.

Food Safety and Coronavirus: A Comprehensive Guide seriouseats.com

Let’s say a food worker coughs while preparing my food, how could I not pick up the virus from eating it? This confused me as well, which is why I specifically inquired about it. According to Chapman, the risk is minimal. Even if a worker sneezes directly into a bowl of raw salad greens before packing it in a take-out container for you to take home, as gross as it is, it's unlikely to get you sick. This 2018 overview of both experimental and observational study of respiratory viruses from the scientific journal Current Opion in Virology (COVIRO) explains that respiratory viruses reproduce along the respiratory tract—a different pathway than the digestive tract food follows when you swallow it.

10 Days That Changed Britain: "Heated" Debate Between Scientists Forced Boris Johnson To Act On Coronavirus buzzfeed.com

"If you want to know how much we underestimated this, last Wednesday Rishi's budget gave a £30 billion stimulus for the economy, six days later he had to spend another £330 billion," said a Whitehall official.

Why Telling People They Don’t Need Masks Backfired nytimes.com

Third, of course masks work — maybe not perfectly and not all to the same degree, but they provide some protection. Their use has always been advised as part of the standard response to being around infected people, especially for people who may be vulnerable.

I’m an epidemiologist. When I heard about Britain’s ‘herd immunity’ coronavirus plan, I thought it was satire theguardian.com

There might well be a second wave, I honestly don’t know. But vulnerable people should not be exposed to a virus right now in the service of a hypothetical future.

I Work from Home newyorker.com

911 OPERATOR: 911—what’s your emergency? ROBERT: Hi, I . . . uh . . . I work from home.

Extraordinary Decisions For Italian Doctors theatlantic.com

Two weeks ago, Italy had 322 confirmed cases of the coronavirus. At that point, doctors in the country’s hospitals could lavish significant attention on each stricken patient. One week ago, Italy had 2,502 cases of the virus, which causes the disease known as COVID-19. At that point, doctors in the country’s hospitals could still perform the most lifesaving functions by artificially ventilating patients who experienced acute breathing difficulties. Today, Italy has 10,149 cases of the coronavirus. There are now simply too many patients for each one of them to receive adequate care. Doctors and nurses are unable to tend to everybody. They lack machines to ventilate all those gasping for air.

COVID-19 reduces economic activity, which reduces pollution, which saves lives g-feed.com

Putting these numbers together yields some very large reductions in premature mortality.  Using the He et al 2016 estimates of the impact of changes in PM on mortality, I calculate that having 2 months of 10ug/m3 reductions in PM2.5 likely has saved the lives of 4,000 kids under 5 and 73,000 adults over 70 in China.  Using even more conservative estimates of 10% reduction in mortality per 10ug change, I estimate 1400 under-5 lives saved and 51700 over-70 lives saved.  Even under these more conservative assumptions, the lives saved due to the pollution reductions are roughly 20x the number of lives that have been directly lost to the virus (based on March 8 estimates of 3100 Chinese COVID-19 deaths, taken from here).  What's the lesson here? It seems clearly incorrect and foolhardy to conclude that pandemics are good for health. Again I emphasize that the effects calculated above are just the health benefits of the air pollution changes, and do not account for the many other short- or long-term negative consequences of social and economic disruption on health or other outcomes; these harms could exceed any health benefits from reduced air pollution.  But the calculation is perhaps a useful reminder of the often-hidden health consequences of the status quo, i.e. the substantial costs that our current way of doing things exacts on our health and livelihoods.

Coronavirus: Why You Must Act Now medium.com

Countries that are prepared will see a fatality rate of ~0.5% (South Korea) to 0.9% (rest of China). Countries that are overwhelmed will have a fatality rate between ~3%-5%. Countries that act fast can reduce the number of deaths by ten.

How Taiwan and Singapore have contained the coronavirus slate.com

Part of Taiwan’s success has been due to its early response, says a new article in the Journal of the American Medical Association. While other countries waffled on acknowledging the danger of the outbreak, Taiwan took action immediately under the guidance of its National Health Command Center, which the country established after the deadly SARS outbreak in 2003 that killed 73 people there. In early January, in response to the then-new outbreak, the NHCC set up Taiwan’s new Central Epidemic Command Center. Taiwan “rapidly produced and implemented a list of at least 124 action items in the past five weeks to protect public health,” said Stanford Health Policy’s Jason Wang, a co-author of the article. “The policies and actions go beyond border control because they recognized that that wasn’t enough.”

Cancel everything theatlantic.com

This suggests that anyone in a position of power or authority, instead of downplaying the dangers of the coronavirus, should ask people to stay away from public places, cancel big gatherings, and restrict most forms of nonessential travel.

Da Milano wittgenstein.it

Questo scenario sta dentro alla cosa più generalmente spaesante di questa crisi senza precedenti: ovvero che non si manifesti visibilmente e drammaticamente se non nel ristretto degli ospedali o nell’astratto dei numeri quotidiani del contagio. Le cose che si fanno, i gesti, i modi di vivere, sono molto “normali” e molto poco ansiosi. Ci si lavano le mani, si sta molto a casa, si sta distanti nelle code in attesa. Ma niente di tutto questo è inaudito, mai visto. C’è insomma un’emergenza enorme “intorno” e non la si vede, non si riesce a vederla nelle singole cose: se scendo a fare la spesa e risalgo, nel percorso e nelle cose che faccio non c’è niente di diverso da un anno fa. A differenza delle emergenze mondiali che hanno occupato i media negli ultimi decenni, questa non ha le immagini, per esempio: è tutto mascherine, per la disperazione dei foto editor. Sta succedendo una cosa enorme, planetaria, senza precedenti dalla fine della Guerra Mondiale: e intanto andiamo a fare il bancomat, e ci facciamo il caffè.

Plot Economics ribbonfarm.com

During narrative collapse, everyone temporarily abandons attempts to reach narrative consensus even within their smallest default groups, such as family. Even people who normally avoid math start to do math with raw, noisy facts. Pantry stocks math. Alcohol percentage math. Infection risk math. Toilet paper math. Math is the backstop log-level activity. The average human only goes data-driven when narratives fail.

Keeping our employees and partners safe during blog.twitter.com

Twitter: Beginning today, we are strongly encouraging all employees globally to work from home if they’re able.

What it's like in China 03.06 reddit.com

Third major measures were focused on case discovery and treatment. Upon discovery of a confirmed case, quick and effective contact tracing measures were put into place. Public areas would take your name and phone number before allowing you to enter, in the event someone there later was determined positive, they could contact you and find you quickly. This moved digitally in QR code based systems, were you would scan various locations, buses, taxis, subways, etc. and be able to be contacted and located quickly. To enter any public area, your temperature is taken. Residential communities issued passes for healthy residents when they would leave their homes, and would only be allowed back in by returning their pass and being checked for temperature again.

Coronavirus: The Black Swan of 2020 medium.com

Having weathered every business downturn for nearly fifty years, we’ve learned an important lesson — nobody ever regrets making fast and decisive adjustments to changing circumstances. In downturns, revenue and cash levels always fall faster than expenses. In some ways, business mirrors biology. As Darwin surmised, those who survive “are not the strongest or the most intelligent, but the most adaptable to change.”

Don’t Panic: The comprehensive Ars Technica guide to the coronavirus arstechnica.com

You should be concerned and take this seriously. But you should not panic

Inside China’s All-Out War on the Coronavirus nytimes.com

China is really good at keeping people alive. Its hospitals looked better than some I see here in Switzerland. We’d ask, “How many ventilators do you have?” They’d say “50.” Wow! We’d say, “How many ECMOs?” They’d say “five.” The team member from the Robert Koch Institute said, “Five? In Germany, you get three, maybe. And just in Berlin.”

The man who refused to freeze to death bbc.com

It would appear that our brains are much better at coping in the cold than dealing with being too hot. This is because our bodies’ survival strategies centre around keeping our vital organs running at the expense of less essential body parts. The most essential of all, of course, is our brain. By the time that Shatayeva and her fellow climbers were experiencing cognitive issues, they were probably already experiencing other organ failures elsewhere in their bodies.

The Word from Wuhan lrb.co.uk

There is a phrase in China for the way such tensions are manifested: when everyone denies all responsibility and tries to shift the blame back onto the blamer, they are busy ‘throwing woks’.

Stand By Your Man newyorker.com

Sartre, in particular, was always speaking to women of his love and devotion, his inability to live without them—every banality of popular romance. Words constituted his principal means of seduction: his physical approaches were on the order of groping in restaurants and grabbing kisses in taxis.

Estote parati it.wikipedia.org

Locuzione in latino per "siate pronti" o "siate preparati"

The WHO sent 25 international experts to China and here are their main findings after 9 days reddit.com

Much of the global community is not yet ready, in mindset and materially, to implement the measures that have been employed to contain COVID-19 in China. These are the only measures that are currently proven to interrupt or minimize transmission chains in humans.

Milano non è un criceto ilpost.it

Due o tre giorni dopo, il 26 di febbraio, emanò il sindaco una grida, in cui ordinava pubbliche feste, per la prima edizione  dell’Apericena Week, senza sospettare o senza curare il pericolo d’un gran concorso, in tali circostanze: tutto come in tempi ordinari, come se non gli fosse stato parlato di nulla.

If you could go to the moon for free, would you do it theoutline.com

Earlier this week, the billionaire Japanese businessman Yusaku Maezawa won the long-running “saddest rich person” contest by announcing that he was looking for a girlfriend go to to the moon with him.

What the coronavirus forcing me in lockdown's taught me about cooking; plus, how to make Mantou reddit.com

Which brings us to the other great culinary mystery our time: why does fusion suck so hard? Because I mean, if you look at cuisines around the world… the cultures at the intersection of great migrations or trade routes seem to have some pretty damn interesting food. Situated in the middle of the silk road, Uighur cuisine is an awesome mix between Northwestern Han Chinese and other central Asian foods. Sichuanese food, meanwhile, was the product of one of the most massive internal migrations of human history, when the province was repopulated by people from Hunan and Shandong after a devasting war (the Qing government kinda killed… everyone). The food in the Malacca straights, with the mix of Southeast Asian, Indian and Chinese flavors is aggressively awesome. Istanbul – at the crossroads of Occident and Orient - is one of the world’s great food cities. So why, despite all of our best efforts in the past forty years, have our culinary mashups seemed to go basically nowhere? Like, seriously. With a touch of digging, you can have an entire globe’s worth of ingredients available to you.

‘High Maintenance’ and the New TV Fantasy of New York nytimes.com

To this generation of newcomers, moving to New York is quite different than it was in the past. As you arrive in the outer ­reaches of Brooklyn gentrification, you and everyone you know find yourselves spread thin geographically, specks of dust in distant orbit around Lower Manhattan, pressing up against communities that feel threatened by your presence. New York is as safe as it has ever been; if anyone’s the bad guy, it’s probably you. Of course, you hope that you aren’t, that you’re the kind of person who appreciates the city for its polyphony of voices, unlike some other newcomers, but in the end it won’t matter. And besides, after a long subway commute home, it’s easier than ever to not leave your apartment again: to order Seamless even though you told yourself you wouldn’t and pop on some streaming television, because there’s always something new to catch up on. And there, on the screen, is the New York you’d dreamed of, the one that challenges your perspective, the one that forces you to become a better version of yourself, the one where strangers come together and connect — even if it’s only for an instant.

Quindi entro in classe e scrivo alla lavagna facebook.com

Perché - dico - la tradizione e la cultura di un popolo sono la selezione di quelle tradizioni e di quella cultura che sono utili al popolo oggi, rimuovendo quelle cose che il popolo ha fatto e che sarebbe pesante ricordare

How to sleep on a plane: 18 illustrated positions for in-flight snoozing washingtonpost.com

There’s no best way to sleep on a plane. There’s no right way, either. There are, however, many ways.