mike carey

This was on Australian Story on Monday night. It's a story of a bacterial infection gone wild. It's also a story of our health system providing treatment in extremis. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-11-23/mick-odowds-strength-in-face-of-quadruple-amputation/12833718

I have no idea whether this is an accurate quote, but it's so good it has to be posted somewhere here. I saw it some random place on twitter. I offer no opinion on which side of the ledger I'm on. Half the world is composed of people who have something to say and can't, and the other half who have nothing to say and keep on saying it. ~ Robert Frost

An avgeek tangent.

@Rod Hagen, I'm looking forward to when I can bring my copy of the latest edition to see what your office desk looks like.

I met him socially at one of the DC forum meetings, so I don't walk funny as a result. From what I've read about him, I'd love to meet him. Even if I walked funny afterwards. But NYC is off my possibles list for a while yet.

Yes, and he'll even move the piles of The Economist off his desk for your tryst!

You're absolutely right to prioritise space on your desk for professional development, and I too have copies of the paper piling up unread. They have not, however, had the same unfortunate effect on my quality of life. (And no, I'm not saying that I have space for 'that', rather that I can't blame a pile of Economists for whatever I can or can't do in certain aspects of my life.) That said, I suspect I still read as much of its content as when I had the time to tackle the printed paper. I used to take it to a local cafe and sit for a couple of hours over a meal and a couple of flat whites and read it through. I still take the printed edition, but I also have a digital subscription (which you can take out without the print) and through the Economist's active tweeting of articles I read a lot of its content on line. I'm still reluctant to cancel the print subscription I've had since 1986. Perhaps you could take out a digital subscription and buy a copy at the newsstand on your way to those flights you still take.

If I am smart it's because I read the Economist not the reverse.

I guess I must be a 'longtime forum member' so yes I remember him well. Thanks for posting this AZDR. Vale Bigvalboy.

It's a multi-variable problem. Mask wearing doesn't prevent transmission of the virus, but it reduces it. So do other measures such as so-called social distancing, hand sanitation and so on. We just don't know how much each contributes. Testing, tracing and isolation takes likely cases out of circulation and leaves more space for the other preventive measures to have an effect. None of the individual measures is a silver bullet, but the fact that transmission is still happening despite mask wearing is not evidence that there is no value in wearing them. One thing to consider when mask wearing is widespread is whether it is happening in the settings where it matters most. If testing and tracing isn't happening enough, people may well wear masks in public but not in 'trusted' settings, like family gatherings, when the trust isn't in fact warranted. The state of Victoria had over 700 cases a day (low by US standards, but off the charts for them), and over several weeks of curfews, limits to travel, limits to gathering sizes, closure of restaurants, cafes and bars to everything but take-away, and mask mandates it was cut down, and yesterday was the 18th day of zero cases. It's not the US, attitudes are different, compliance was generally good, and the scale of the problem was less than US states face, but it did work.

@SundayZip I subscribe to both at the moment (and to The Australian [which includes the WSJ] and the Economist) and both the NYT and the Post seem about the same to me. You have some good articles in both. I lean a little towards the NYT because they have an Australian bureau and its head is on the TV here from time to time, and both there and in 'print' he brings an outside perspective to some Australian political stories. That, of course, is not relevant to your decision. Both allow a certain number of free articles to nonsubscribers, so you're not cutting yourself off completely by not subscribing. I guess whether that approach works for you depends on whether you go to the site and look through it, or as I more often do, rely on social media postings about their articles and mainly read those to which you have been alerted.

Nope, not even slightly.

Another story to which the question posed in the title applies but for which it was not intended has come out today, and to me is a glimmer of hope for the post-CoviD-19 aviation world. Singapore Airlines is proceeding with reconfiguring the cabins of 12 of their A380 aircraft. https://onemileatatime.com/singapore-airlines-reconfiguring-a380-new-cabins/ I know there are some of you who while sceptical of the advantages of these aeroplanes, were 'hooked' once you flew on one. I know I was booked on one for the return leg of my ill-fated trip to Palm Springs this year (I didn't book the less convenient outbound route via LAX rather than use SFO on a B787 just to use an A380). With this announcement Singapore is all-but confirming that they will be operating the aircraft again, and SYD and MEL to SIN are likely routes for them once we open our borders. Whether Qantas does the same is still a decision for the future, and whether they will fly them, or anything, to LAX again even further in the future. In the meantime, one small victory at a time.

This speaks to a lot of the unknowns about the virus. We don't know how effective a vaccine, or this vaccine in particular, will be and we don't know how long any immunity will last. We also don't know how variable the virus is and whether the pattern of protection it provides from the virus will be like the flu (endlessly changing) or like measles (consistent) or somewhere in between the two. What we do know, is that if it provides any level of protection, either from transmission or from serious disease, that will reduce the spread of the virus and complement the social distancing and mask wearing that have the same effect. Any reduction of its spread is a good thing.

I spent a couple of hours in The Strand last time I was in NYC, and I can understand why it has the status of 'venerable'. I don't remember if I bought a book, but I did buy a tote bag with, 'And yet she persisted', on it for my sister.

I have to say, when I read 'Great Tits' I thought it was about the birds in question not some reference to female anatomy. If it had just said 'tits' I would not have been so sure.

As it's been explained here by a medical researcher from Monash University in Melbourne on TV this morning, the effectiveness of the vaccine is being tested by examining people in the trial who contract the virus, and the number of infections required is about 150 from the 42K volunteers in six countries, they are at 93 or 94 at the moment so they have about two thirds of the required sample, so a reasonable indication. The vast majority of the infections are among people who received the placebo, and from that they have inferred that the vaccine is 90% effective. If the vaccine was not effective you would assume that half the cases would have been among those who had received the vaccine. That's not definitive, and when the other third of the positive cases are identified, the level of confidence in the results will be higher.

It's an interesing sign of our times that this is happening. Here, in addition to the usual election whisperer on the ABC, there's been a young journo who's been his offsider in presenting the statistics and trends. He's also become a bit of a twitter star (and he does play it up a bit in that playpen). A couple of hours ago he commented that the ABC's election night coverage was winding up after 99 hours. The first of hiw tweets after that was *blink* *blink*. His public profile has been steadily growing, as he played the same role in two state and territory elections in the second half of October, and before then and in the gaps between them he's been the stats and graphs guy on the pandemic.

Mike's been very active on twitter promoting his Only Fans and JFF, so it looks like he's made that switch to help deal with the current situation.

Nobody knows. Whatever happens, the vaccine will only be part of the answer, part will still be the social distancing precautions we have been taking (including masks, sanitisers etc). The safety of intimate contact will depend on the effectiveness of the measures everyone takes in society. I hired a guy last night, he comes from an essentially Covid-free city and where I am is too. He told me he won't see anyone from Sydney which has had maybe three or four cases a day for a few months now. I think his caution may be excessive, but who am I to argue.

I agree to an extent. Reducing the spread is the key. All the mitigation measures help, and that includes social distancing, masks, hand sanitising, cough etiquette. They mean even if someone has it they pass it on to fewer others. That can result in local elimination, but you can't stop the preventative measures then because you never know when it might come back. We will need to keep doing those things until there is a vaccine, and even after that as the vaccine is likely to be, say 50% effective, so we won't be able to see the spread. Even with that, we need to maintain the testing, tracing and isolation for the disease so we can lock down any cases that appear, and that needs to be mandatory. It is here, and as @samhexum noted in another thread isn't and likely can't be in the US. Diseases die out when they can't spread. Everything we can do to stop them spreading helps. Covid-19 measures all-but snuffed out seasonal flu in Australia this year. This disease is likely to be endemic in the community so we need to reduce its ability to spread and ensure we have the public health measures to detect it and stop it if it does.

Well, for some of us, forum Palm Springs weekends won't be happening for a while. I suspect (to trivialise the question for a moment) masks as fashion statements might become a thing when we resume.

This is interesting. I had a vague idea that cities and counties (or parishes) were overlapping entities in the US. The explanation for Philly helps me make sense of it, as does @augustus' explanation of the overlapping jurisdictional issues. Here we have one layer of local government jurisdictional areas, whether they are called cities, municipalities or shires. There are no cities or towns that have any sort of local government overlaid on them. Also, they don't have their own courts or police, they are all run by the state government.

Damn, I missed the chance to meet you in 2019, and almost certainly won't be able to be there in 2021.