diff --git a/archive-covid-19/08 May, 2022.html b/archive-covid-19/08 May, 2022.html new file mode 100644 index 0000000..c0a34a0 --- /dev/null +++ b/archive-covid-19/08 May, 2022.html @@ -0,0 +1,221 @@ + + + + + + 08 May, 2022 + +Covid-19 Sentry + +

Covid-19 Sentry

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Contents

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From Preprints

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  1. the heterogeneity in disease transmission and outcomes for faculty/staff and students based on vaccination status and level of natural immunity; and (ii) variant- and dose-dependent vaccine efficacy. Using the Spring 2022 academic semester as a case study, we study various routine screening strategies, and find that screening the faculty/staff less frequently than the students, and/or the boosted and vaccinated less frequently than the unvaccinated, may avert a higher number of infections per test, compared to universal screening of the entire population at a common frequency. We also discuss key policy issues, including the need to revisit the mitigation objective over time, effective strategies that are informed by booster coverage, and if and when screening alone can compensate for low booster coverage. +

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    +🖺 Full Text HTML: Screening for safe opening of universities under Omicron and Delta variants of COVID-19: When less is more +
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  1. The incentive accounted for 6,476-10,874 additional first vaccine doses from November 1-27, 2021, or 8.31-13.95% of all doses administered to those aged ≥60 years during that period. This result is robust to the inclusion of controls for the number of active vaccine delivery sites and for the nationwide Vooma weekend initiative (November 12-14), both of which also increased vaccinations through expanded access to vaccines and demand creation activities. Conclusions/Relevance: Financial incentives for COVID-19 vaccination led to a modest increase in first dose vaccinations among older adults in South Africa. In addition to financial incentives, expanded access to vaccines may also results in higher vaccination coverage. +

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    +🖺 Full Text HTML: A quasi-experimental cohort study evaluating a conditional economic incentive on first-dose COVID-19 vaccination rates among older adults in South Africa +
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+🖺 Full Text HTML: Fertility recovery despite the COVID-19 pandemic in Finland? +
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From Clinical Trials

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From PubMed

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  1. Older people have been disproportionately affected by the disease, as they have greater risk of hospitalization, are more vulnerable to severe infection, and have higher mortality than younger patients. Although effective vaccines have been rapidly developed…
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From Patent Search

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Daily-Dose

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Contents

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From New Yorker

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From Vox

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+Yeah, it’s that, but also much more. When I was re-reading Origins of Totalitarianism a couple of months ago, I was astonished by how often the word “hate” came into her conversation about the creation of the mass. She noticed that it’s really easy to work with people’s anger and whip up a mob, and she has this great statement in the book about the alliance between the mob and the elite and how the elite are quite good at spotting and using the hate that’s already there. +

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+I mean, she’s a historian, so she’s going to say it is things like unemployment. It is things like not being able to keep your home. And when you look at the early 20th century and look at those rates of inflation and unemployment, and then you have the World War and the civil wars across Europe, and then you have miss migration and so on, we’re not just talking about some kind of ennui here. This is raw, real stuff. It’s easy to raise a mob in these conditions. You’re starting with real anger. +

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+This is the creation of the mass and it isn’t just fascism. This isn’t just populism. This is totalitarianism proper in Arendt’s mind. She says at one point, and this is a quote that’s resonated with me for a few years now, that “the masses’ escape from reality is a verdict against the world in which they’re forced to live.” Often the question is, well, how can people be so stupid? How can anyone fall for this? That’s the wrong way to think about it. Totalitarian politics is a verdict against the world in which people are forced to live. It’s a slap in the face. It’s a finger up against the real conditions of existence. +

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+People will often refer to the masses as if they’re gullible and stupid, which on the one hand is just terrible politics. But on the other hand, it’s actually stupid. I mean, people aren’t stupid. A term that’s just as important as loneliness is cynicism. Totalitarianism works through cynicism. It’s crucial because it allows people to say, “They’re all the same, it’s all bullshit, isn’t it? It’s just politics, isn’t it?” What cynicism allows you to do is be gullible and disbelieving at the same time. +

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+Sean Illing +

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+Arendt thought that before a totalitarian ideology could overwhelm reality, it had to first ruin people’s relationship with themselves and others by making them so skeptical and so cynical that they could no longer rely upon their own judgment. So there’s that part of it. +

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+And then she imagines thinking as much more than an activity. She imagines it as a way of being. It is obviously something we do with ourselves, but the real gift of thinking isn’t all the great ideas and grand theories that intellectuals come up with. The gift of thinking is that as long as you’re doing it, you have the capacity to judge. Why is that so critical? +

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+Lyndsey Stonebridge +

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+So let’s just start with thinking, because getting from thinking to judgment is tricky in Arendt. Thinking, for her, is radically democratic. Everyone, she says, has that dialogue with themselves — not all the time, because obviously if you stop to think about what you’re doing all the time, you’d never get out of bed. But a lot of the time, we all have the capacity to think. +

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+We walk around the street. We lose ourselves in our thoughts, and being lost in thought is a gift for Arendt. She says this isn’t time-wasting. This isn’t frivolous. This is what thinking is and we need to take it seriously. She has this beautiful quote where she says, “What makes loneliness so unbearable is the loss of one’s own self, which can be realized in solitude, but confirmed in its identity only by the trusting and trustworthy company of my equals.” +

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+Solitude is very different from loneliness. Solitude is where I go to hear myself think, where I re-gather my thoughts, which makes me fit to return to the world, because I’m not clicking on a bloody “like” or “dislike” or I’m not following another pattern. I am thinking for myself, which, when things are really bad, is all we have. +

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+But going back to judging, she argues that without the ability to think, there can not be any judgment. When she really saw that is when she looked at the Nazi officer Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961 in the courtroom: a self-important man chattering away, talking self-importantly, not even realizing who he was facing — the relatives and survivors of people he had murdered — and he just spoke in cliches. The longer she listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was totally connected with his inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of someone else. +

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+Sean Illing +

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+Arendt fled Nazism twice and eventually landed in New York in 1941. What did she make of America when she got here? Did she think we were lonely? Did she think Americans were thinking in ways that might help them avoid the totalitarian horrors she left behind in Europe? +

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+Lyndsey Stonebridge +

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+She had two visions of America. I often refer to Hannah Arendt having pigeon eyes because she tended to look at both sides of life. On the one hand, she was concerned about American culture, because she saw in the rise of consumer culture a tendency toward social conformity that had already been there. +

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+When she arrived in America, she wrote to Karl Jaspers, her old teacher, and said, “It’s amazing. I can’t understand why a culture that has such a brilliant political foundation can be so socially conservative.” The more time she spent in America, the more worried she was about public relations and consumer capitalism and how that was taking America further and further away from what she understood to be its revolutionary tradition. +

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+Sean Illing +

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+She lays all this out in a speech shortly after the Vietnam War ended, right? +

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+Lyndsey Stonebridge +

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+Yeah, the last paper that she published was based on a talk that she gave in 1975. She was asked to speak a few weeks after the fall of Saigon, and she says, “this is what America has to face: It’s gone further and further away from itself into a culture in which politics is marketing, in which politics is PR.” For her, the fall of Saigon revealed that America had just suffered a humiliating and outright defeat. +

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+Then she listed the things that led up to that. She talked about the Pentagon Papers and how they revealed that there was no purpose to that war other than maintaining the fiction that America was an all-powerful free nation — a fiction, by the way, that was good enough for other people’s children to die for. Watergate showed that this whole thing was being cooked up by a bunch of second-rate crooks. This was politics. This was American politics. +

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+She insisted that we had to recognize that reality. And the reality was that America was not great and free and wonderful, it was not that powerful. We had just suffered a catastrophic loss, and we had jeopardized our politics at the same time. That’s what she called the “big lie,” a phrase that was picked up again when Trump pushed his own big lie about the election. She said that this is how totalitarianism works. You just invent an outrageous big lie and you stick to it. +

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+Sean Illing +

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+Would she say the algorithms are doing the thinking for us today? +

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+Lyndsey Stonebridge +

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+Yeah, she would. You know, Arendt was often appalling on American race relations. She didn’t get Black America at all. But what she would’ve liked about Black Lives Matter, what she liked about the student movement at the time, was that it demonstrated the power of free people acting in concert, and she thought that would always be the saving grace because it was about the possibility of new beginnings. +

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+What she would’ve thought was tragic was everything being algorithmized into social media because then you don’t get the very messy business of politics, which is about sitting in rooms with people who are really pissy and annoying and trying to get something done. It’s not about clicking on theories. You actually have to deal with the messy reality of politics and action. What really would’ve appalled her today is the hemorrhaging of so much political energy. +

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+To hear the rest of the conversation, click here, and be sure to subscribe to Vox Conversations on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts. +

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+This is the EU’s sixth sanctions package — and its most complicated yet +

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+As von der Leyen said, this is the most significant and complex sanctions package the EC is poised to impose on Russia for its invasion of Ukraine. That means engaging in difficult negotiations and balancing competing needs and priorities. +

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+Upon Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24, “there were calls for an embargo almost immediately,” Thane Gustafson, a political science professor at Georgetown University and author of the book Klimat: Russia in the age of Climate Change, told Vox on Saturday. “It’s taken some time to put things on the drawing board.” Given the challenge of getting all 27 member states on board with an oil embargo, Wednesday’s announcement actually came about fairly quickly; but that also indicates that EC members and leadership are “playing this by ear,” Gustafson said, hence the outcry from Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and others. +

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+Those nations don’t have energy alternatives to sustain their economies as of right now, which is why Hungary and Slovakia were initially offered an additional year — until the end of 2023 — to comply with the embargo. Hungary has requested an exemption to the import of crude oil by pipeline, and Slovakia and the Czech Republic are arguing for longer transition periods, according to the Financial Times. Although the details are still under discussion, reporting from Reuters on Friday indicated that the EC will extend the timelines for those countries to wean themselves off of Russian oil and provide assistance for refinery upgrades. +

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+“The key thing is to bring the Hungarians on board,” Gustafson said. “There will be bargaining both ways,” he told Vox. That’s because of the EC principle of unanimity, not because Hungary — or, for that matter, Slovakia or the Czech Republic — consume enough Russian oil for their participation in the ban to matter in an economic sense, since Hungarian and Slovak imports account for only about 6 percent of the EU’s Russian oil imports, according to Reuters. +

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+Will these sanctions deliver the intended blow to the Russian economy? +

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+While Gustafson believes that there will be a decision on the oil embargo, “in the near term, it’s going to be a muted blow.” For one, there are still nations that will purchase Russian oil in the short term — although eventually, Gustafson told Vox, Russia will run out of the capacity to ship or store enough oil to make up for the losses from the EU embargo, thus forcing the industry to slow production, resulting in prices being driven down. +

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+But according to the Wednesday Group, which tracks Russian oil exports, price increases on fuel have meant that Russia is raking in about as much money from sales as it did prior to the US decision to ban Russian oil imports back in March. Though the EU is the largest importer of Russian oil, the staggered transition timeline that the EC is proposing could potentially give Russia more time to negotiate exports to other nations; that’s already happening with India, the Washington Post reports, +

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+The proposed ban is a major shift from EU policy just two months ago, when the bloc refused to join the full US embargo on Russian energy products. At that time, the bloc unveiled a plan to cut down on natural gas dependence by two-thirds by the end of this year; Wednesday’s announcement didn’t address that pledge or the topic of natural gas at all. +

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+The natural gas question is complex, certainly, and Russia has been able to weaponize the resource, cutting off flows to Poland and Bulgaria for their refusal to buy it with rubles last month. Part of the issue, Gustafson explained, is that natural gas exports are governed by long-term contracts which can employ “take-or-pay” clauses — as in, a country either takes the product or pays for a specific amount even if it doesn’t take the gas. Shutting off access, therefore, isn’t just a matter of refusing to purchase the commodity. Finding an alternative source for natural gas isn’t that straightforward, either. The infrastructure to replace natural gas imports from Russia with imports from other countries like the US doesn’t yet exist at the necessary scale — and increased production and use would likely severely compromise climate goals. +

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+Furthermore, Russia’s natural gas exports — both shipments as liquid natural gas and via pipelines like the now-scuttled Nord Stream 2 — have actually increased since the beginning of the war, according to the Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air. +

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+But “the biggest question is Germany,” Gustafson said. The biggest economy in the EU, Germany relies heavily on Russian natural gas to heat homes and power its economy; dismantling that infrastructure without triggering a recession with wide-ranging effects will be a delicate negotiation indeed. Germany long ago developed “very elaborate” partnerships with Russia, Gustafson noted, particularly after the fall of the Soviet Union. Germany’s thinking was that such economic interdependence would ensure peace in Europe, which The Daily explained in an episode last month. The invasion of Ukraine undid decades of peace, and Germany’s energy transition will have to undo decades of cooperation with and dependence on Russian sources. +

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+If and when the EC unanimously decides a path forward to wrest EU member nations from dependence on Russian fuel, it’s not clear what the desired effect of an oil or all-out fuel embargo would be. Theoretically, the goal of cutting off profits from Russia’s fuel industry is to stop Putin’s war machine by bleeding the Russian economy. It could take quite a long time before the EU’s embargo has that significant of an effect, though. +

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+Wednesday’s announcement doesn’t appear to have altered Putin’s viewpoint, either. The Kremlin’s response to the embargo proposal has been in line with its attitude toward Western involvement in the war, Gustafson told Vox: “The dominant response, and certainly the public response, is defiance, and defiance toward the West.” +

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From The Hindu: Sports

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From The Hindu: National News

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From BBC: Europe

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From Ars Technica

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From Jokes Subreddit

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