19 Comments

My mother died in NYC on March 20th, 2020 after being taken to the hospital the night before. it was not Covid, but a sudden rupture of internal organs. We were not allowed to see her, which, given the early uncertainty.chaos about the pandemic I understand. Plus we did not think she was in danger of dying until the very end. But it will always be a permanent regret that I was unable to say goodbye. So a long way of saying, absolutely I agree, let people say goodbye to their loved ones.

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"As government interventions go, creating lots more and bigger Strategic National Stockpiles of goods that are highly valuable in a pinch seems like an excellent plan, and a 1-out-2-in general rule might even be justified."

I'm curious if there's a comprehensive list of stockpile inventory. phe.gov doesn't really seem to have much on it.

Also would love to hear speculation on what would make for good stockpile items. Fuel of all types, medical supplies, and self-stable food makes sense, but what else?

Unrelated: "is giving us four free masks" -- I think this should say "four free tests".

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1) In addition to not being a civil engineer, I am also not a lawyer. But I've been reading opinions and listening to arguments for years. Your takes on SCOTUS are good. A few quibbles (they were super hard on Trump, not easy on him), but very good.

2) For Austrailia, you hit the nail on the head. The problem with witch trials isn't that witches aren't real. Its that communities that produce and support witchfinder generals are WAAAAAYYYY worse than witches.

3) Umbrellas. This is classic 0-sum thinking. The possitive sum solution that my genetic and educational and profesional background as an engineer screams in my ear is "Make rain-resistant coats more common." I don't know exactly what that means, but it probably invovles having air-quality sensors and control in most common places in additon to HVAC. You know that Equality vs Equity cartoon where people are trying to watch a baseball game? Just make it a chain-link fence.

But this kind of 0-sum thinking is exactly what you would expect from people who play status games for a living, so no surprise that it happens on twitter. I really like your take on how it illustrates more than was intended though. The 0-sum critique isn't directed at you Zvi.

4) Deleted twitter thread. I'm in tech but not Bay Area FANGy tech. Have observed the same. Older workforce I'm exposed to, and its very generational. N+1.

5) New music is *way* more diverse than when radio ruled the yard. A few years ago, my kids 3rd grade teacher asked them all what their favorite band was, and got like 19 answers out of 22 kids. My son, the trendsetter, said GloryHammer. GloryHammer will never (sadly) be the top of a chart. Whereas everyone knows who CCR or Sting are/were.

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I keep hearing about people seriously ill from covid in the hospital being told it's too late to get vaccinated until they recover. If vaccines start helping immediately, is that a big mistake? Or is there some other issue (side effects?) that makes it a bad idea to vaccinate people who are seriously ill?

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We have been in the hospital twice since the start of the the pandemic. Once for the birth of our first child and once for my husband's gall bladder surgery. Both occasions were totally mundane events that exposed us to the stupidity of hospital visitation rules. The birth wasn't too bad, my husband wasn't officially allowed to leave the room, but no one seemed to care when he snuck out to the cafeteria. More annoying was that if he left the hospital, he couldn't return. We we there longer than expected and it would have been nice if he could have gone and checked on our pets.

With his gallbladder, we weren't aware until it happened that they weren't allowing any visitors under the age of 18. It was a Sunday, he (phobic of medical procedures generally) was alone and in pain after a midnight trip to the ER and it looked like he was in for a multiday stay. We are new to the city and didn't really have anyone who could watch our 8 month old on a Sunday. So he had to stay alone.

Now I am set to give birth again in June. If they keep these policies up, my son won't be able to come visit his new sibling in the hospital. Also, partly because of covid, he has never been away from us overnight. All this minor heartbreak for a policy that really makes no sense. If anything, kids probably transmit less than adults and should be the only visitors allowed in. Our hospital is a university hospital, they are giving the undergrads on demand rapid tests, why can't the same been done for the visitors of people who are sick or dying?

I work for the hospital as a research scientist and when people turn their ire on the unvaccinated, I am inclined to point fingers at the hospital administration because their responses have been abysmal in every way.

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I still don’t understand why certain people want to imprison no vax; 1) because they spread the virus 2) because the love them and want to save them from the eventuality of a severe form of covid 3) because they think they are not good citizens?

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>"Australia could have made a principled decision that Djokovic lied on his visa application, and those who lie on their application get deported. They could have made a principled decision that there is no exemption for recently having Covid-19, or that they didn’t believe his claim that he’d had it. Or they could claim that they admit people into the country as inherently political decisions at their sole discretion, and been straight about it."

The important point is that the stated justification was chosen not for accuracy nor even for politics, but for the probability that it would stand up in court. The Immigration Department's lawyers would have settled on the "threat to public order" justification as the one least likely to get overturned.

>"Instead, they made absurd consequentialist claims that entail the right to enforce arbitrary punishments for failures to kowtow to authority, as the guiding principle of the state, as a matter of principle"

I think the general understanding of the actual, if not legalistic, justification is a lot simpler. The rules say, not unreasonably, "No getting in without vaccination". Novak somehow finagled his way around this with some absurd legal justification, so we kicked him out again with a different absurd legal justification, upholding both the spirit and the letter of the law.

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> I’d also note that has anyone tried carrying around an umbrella all the time?

Yes: https://shop.eaglemoss.com/static/media/catalog/product/i/m/dcauk002_1.jpg

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Can someone explain the "post-infection vaccination gives protection" thing? My understanding is that the immune system has a certain capacity to fight stuff off. If you get vaccinated while sick, your immune system needs to divide its attention between fighting the infection and blowing up the random spike protein from the vaccine. Since it means you have immune cells dedicated to blowing up random spike protein, it means you have fewer immune cells dedicated to fighting the infection. That's what my doctor explained to me when she recommended I get over a cold before getting a flu vaccine. Is there some difference between the cold/flu vaccine case and the COVID/COVID vaccine case which makes things different? Or is it some weirdness specific to mRNA vaccines? Anyone care to help me get a gears-level model of what's going on there? A specific emphasis on whether the general rule I was told that you shouldn't get vaccinated while sick and if/when I should ignore it would be appreciated.

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Ad Djokovic, my impression is that this is how all countries decide which foreigners to let on their territory all the time. Lots of elaborate legal rules that ultimately boil down to authorizations for basically arbitrary decision-making based on power.

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