Drugs, denials, and British politics

Posted on December 19, 2022 by Ellen Hawley

It’s always fun when you can wring a denial out of a politician, and the denials are rolling in: Unspecified people who do equally unspecified work at Chevening–an estate used by Britain’s secretary of state–reported finding “suspected class A drugs” after parties thrown by Liz Truss, the lettuce who became prime minister but was then secretary of state.

Lettuce? Well, yes. Her tenure as prime minister was so short that a lettuce publicly outlasted her. She’ll never live it down.

What kind of class A drugs? Something that registered as cocaine when it was tested with a swab that changes color when it gets high. Or, more accurately, when it comes into contact with cocaine.

Irrelevant photo: This is from our recent cold snap.

Is cocaine legal in Britain? Nope. Possession carries a sentence of up to seven years or an unlimited fine or both, and in July the government launched (or anyway, announced; I can’t swear that they did any more than that) a crackdown on casual users.

Casual users? Yes. Those are the kind of users who have passports, because it was going to confiscate them. That’s a more fitting punishment for a high-end user than jail time, which is a better fit for the low-end, no-passport, no-invite-to-Chevening kind of drug user.

An unspecified insider says cocaine’s used widely in Whitehall (“Whitehall” being shorthand for British government offices) and around Parliament. And you know how it is: These are important people. You can’t just toss them in jail when they do something illegal.

During the ten minutes when Truss was prime minister, one of her spokes-salads said cracking down on illegal drugs was a priority.

Cleaners report finding white powder at no less a residence than 10 Downing Street after two of the parties that were held during lockdown back when Boris Johnson was prime minister. Johnson outlasted many lettuces as well as a head of broccoli, and although several barbers are rumored to have attempted damage control on his hair he outran them all.

No one’s saying either Truss or Johnson put the powder up their own personal noses. In fact, Johnson’s said not to have been at either of the No. 10 parties that left powder behind. But it does raise questions about the culture around them and what’s tolerated at high levels and not at lower ones.

So what about those denials?

When the Guardian, which broke the story, asked for a comment, Truss’s spokes-salad said, “If there were evidence that this alleged activity had occurred during her use of Chevening, Ms Truss would have expected to have been informed and for the relevant authorities to have properly investigated the matter. As it is, the Guardian has produced no evidence to support these spurious claims.”

A spokescomb for Boris Johnson said, “Boris Johnson is surprised by these allegations since he has not previously been made aware of any suggestions of drug use in 10 Downing Street and as far as he is aware no such claims were made to Sue Gray or to any other investigators.

“It was a feature of Mr Johnson’s premiership that he strongly campaigned against drug use, especially middle-class drug use. His government made huge investments in tougher policing to help roll up county lines drugs gangs, which cause so much misery. He repeatedly called for harsher punishments for the use and distribution of class A drugs.”

A spokesdriver for No 10’s current U-turn expert said, “The Guardian has provided no evidence to support these claims. If there were substantive claims, we would expect these to be reported to the police.”

So there you go. Move along, folks. Nothing to see here.

Larry the Cat refused to comment but is alleged to have a serious catnip habit. As for me, I don’t usually post in the middle of the week, but this was too much fun to ignore.

The future of mRNA vaccines

Posted on December 2, 2022 by Ellen Hawley

Covid may end up giving us an unexpected gift–a real one, not some snarky, I’m-saying-the-opposite-of-what-I-mean gift. All the work that went into developing the mRNA vaccines for Covid may soon translate into a flu vaccine that works against all 20 known subtypes of flu. It’s still in the testing stage, but it’s looking promising, and since flu can turn from annoying to lethal without having to file paperwork, this is no small thing.

In animal tests, it reduced symptoms as well as protected the little beasties against death.

To be clear: protection against death is good. It’s not as good as 600% protection against illness, as we know from the Covid vaccines, which miss that 600% bullseye, but it’s a hell of a lot better than having zero protection against death.

The flu vaccines that are around now are seasonal: they protect against the recent versions but if some new strain that jumps unexpectedly from a bird or animal, adapts to humans, refuses to file paperwork, and turns out to be as potent as the 1918 flu–well, they’re not up to the job.

The 1918 flu? That’s the one those of us over a certain age learned to call the Spanish flu because it didn’t originate in Spain and because it’s important to have someone to blame, however inaccurately.

Thoroughly irrelevant photo: a neighbor’s dahlia

The developers of the new vaccine are currently designing human trials, and with luck the vaccine will be available by 2024.

Yeah, so what else can the technology do?

Since you asked, mRNA technology makes the creation of multivalent (be impressed with that word, please) vaccines relatively easy.

Multivalent vaccines? They’re the ones like that flu vaccine that fore-arm us against bugs with pandemic potential, even when we’re not forewarned.

The vaccine we really need these days is a pan-coronavirus vaccine, and one is moving into the human-trial stage. Or it’s fixin’ to get ready to think about moving into the human-trial stage. It’s close. In animal trials, three doses not only protected against severe disease, it also protected against infection and decreased the amount of virus the vaccinated animals shed, so they were less likely to pass it on.

Now we come to the hazy part: The article I read introduced it as a vaccine against coronaviruses in general, but the rest of the article focused on it as a Covid vaccine. I’ll leave you to figure out what that means. I’m short on time and can’t trace this one through the convolutions of the internet.

The article did say, “The vaccine candidate is a combination of a nanoparticle antigen . . . along with an adjuvant—an ingredient that boosts a vaccine’s effects . . . . The adjuvant formulation, 3M-052-AF, significantly enhanced the immune responses in the animals when combined with the antigen.”

I’d translate that for you but I’m in so far over my head that not even the tips of my fingers reach the air. It does sound impressive, though.

A Covid nasal vaccine is also in development, and it’s designed to piggyback on the immunity that previously vaccinated people carry. By coming in through the nose, it can work primarily on the mucus lining, which is where Covid likes to throw a housewarming party when it enters a body. If the vaccine works, it will be the emergency number you’ll want to call before the party starts, because you know what kind of neighbors Covid germs are. Loud music, fights, broken glass on the sidewalk.

I could go on, but you get the picture.

In a trial, the spray protected previously vaccinated mice against both death and disease. It did zilch for unvaccinated mice. In hamster trials, it reduced transmission of the disease. It doesn’t use live viruses, viral vectors, or adjuvants, and that may make the vaccine safer.

Why? How much? No idea. Go do your own research.

So far, it hasn’t been tested in humans and the article I read was heavily spiced with the word may, so it’s not time to get too excited about this one. Although that hasn’t stopped me.

What about vitamin D and Covid?

Do vitamin D supplements protect against Covid? According to two studies, no. It makes sense that they would–vitamin D supports the immune system–but in a trial of 6,000 people vitamin D supplements made no difference in the number of either Covid or other respiratory tract infections. A second trial involved 35,000 people and tested vitamin D plus cod liver oil. Again, no noticeable difference emerged.

Both trials have their limits. In one, some people in the control group popped the occasional vitamin D supplement. In the other, most of the participants weren’t low on vitamin D at the start of the trial, so the real trial was with a much small group. And vaccines were rolled out during both trials, throwing the balance off. So don’t count them as conclusive, just suggestive.

The endless, depressing news about long Covid and (new word here) post-Covid

Having had Covid can–emphasis on can; it doesn’t always–leave people with nervous system damage that messes with anything from their sense of smell to their ability to concentrate. It can increase their chances of having a stroke–not right away but eventually.

It’s called neuro-Covid. Yes, folks, it’s another new word. Don’t say Covid hasn’t been generous with us.

A study that looked at the cerebrospinal fluid and blood plasma of people with neuro-Covid found an overblown immune response in the group with the most serious symptoms: impairments in the blood barrier that could have been caused by a cytokine storm; antibodies that had turned on the body’s own cells; and an overactivation of the microglia, which are immune cells responsible specifically for the brain. People with serious symptoms also had a smaller brain mass than healthy people, especially in the area responsible for the sense of smell.

“The virus triggers such a strong inflammatory response in the body that it spills over to the central nervous system,” Professor Gregor Hutter of the University Hospital of Basel said. “This can disrupt the cellular integrity of the brain.”

The researchers are hoping to find a test that could predict long Covid and neuro-Covid before they strike, and to identify targets for drugs to attack–in other words, to identify the excessive immune response at an early stage so they can put the brakes on it.

A different study shows that having multiple Covid infections increases the risk of long Covid and of other post-Covid health risks. This was a massive study–5.8 million people in the US Veterans’ Affairs database. Its limitation is that this is a population primarily of older white males, so diverse it ain’t.

The study showed that, compared to people who hadn’t been reinfected, people with repeat infections are twice as likely to die prematurely and three times more likely to be hospitalized. Heart and lung problems were more than three times more common, and reinfection also contributes to brain conditions, kidney disease, and diabetes.

The risk could increase with each infection.

Are you depressed yet? Sorry. It’s not pretty out there and I would have to open the damn curtains. But since I have . . .

Another study came at post-Covid brain problems from a different direction.

To back up for a minute and state the obvious: The problem with studying brains is that as long as their owners are using them you have to accept some limits on the ways you study them. You only have access to certain information once their owners to die, which most people are reluctant to do, even in the interest of science. So this set of researchers created brain organoids–little clusters of brain cells the size of a pinhead. If the organoids object to being messed with, they have no way of letting us know, so it’s open season and the researchers infected them with Covid.

Sorry, guys. For the greater good and all that.

The researchers found that an unusual number of synapses were eliminated.

So what? Well, synapses are the social media of the brain. They allow the neurons to communicate with each other. In the normal wear and tear that goes on inside a brain, a number of synapses will be eliminated, which may explain why I can’t remember what I did five days ago, not to mention the fingering for an F chord on the guitar: The downsizing committee up there decided I no longer need to know those things and got rid of the relevant synapses in the name of efficiency. I might still want to know that stuff, but it’s austerity up there in my skull and something had to go. I should be grateful my brain didn’t ditch everything I know about commas, because, hey, that’s important.

I’m aware that that last paragraph implies that who- or whatever I am exists separately from my brain, but let’s stay out of that rabbithole while I remind you that austerity is what Britain’s government–or what passes for a government when it’s not tied up with more important business–calls cutting public services. Calling it austerity, though, makes it sound like it’s good for us. Think of it as the kale of the political world.

So what the researchers saw happening in the infected organoids was something like what’ll happen in austerity Britain 2.0, which is Sunakian austerity as opposed to Cameronian austerity. When the promised spending cuts kick in, it won’t just be the F chord that goes, it’ll be the smell of lilacs and where I put my car keys and the oomph I need to get from one end of the official looking letter that just came in the mail to the other so I can figure out if I’m being evicted or asked to serve as the next prime minister.

Did I lose you in that last paragraph? Sorry. I was having such fun–

I’ll summarize in a marginally sane way: In infected organoids, an excessive number of connections were downsized–or as serious people would put it, eliminated. That’s frighteningly like what happens in Alzheimers, Parkinsons, and schizophrenia.

It’s true that our brains are bigger than organoids, and with luck, more complex. But post-mortems on Covid patients (post-mortems, I remind you, are carried out on people who are no longer using their brains), as well as brain imaging on live patients, show that the gray matter isn’t as thick in people who’ve been infected, which hints at a loss of synapses.

Keep in mind that we’re still in the land of hints, though, not definitive conclusions, and also that I’m not clear on whether the post-mortems and scans were carried out on people who’d had serious cases of Covid or simply from people who’d been infected.

For the researchers, the next step is to look at whether various drugs will inhibit all that downsizing.

Some of us living in Britain want to know if some drug can stop the government from downsizing services that have already been downsized so radically that they’re held together by nothing more than thread and newspaper headlines.

Will you forgive me if I toss in a bit of good news? Paxlovid looks like it decreases the odds of developing long Covid.

Pax-what? It’s an antiviral pill that reduces the chances of hospitalization and death in people who’ve been infected–and reduces the chances of long Covid by 25%.

That’s from a preliminary study–it hasn’t been peer reviewed yet, and its study subjects were (again) mostly older white males in high-risk groups, but the US National Institutes of Health plan to study the drug’s effectiveness on people who already have long Covid to see if it works after the fact.

“A very British way” of saying no: It’s the news from Britain

Posted on November 11, 2022 by Ellen Hawley

“A very British way” of saying no: It’s the news from Britain

Our most recent ex-prime minister, Liz Truss, may not have outlasted that famous lettuce, but she hasn’t dropped out of the news.

In spite of being prime minister for only 44 days, she and the loyalists who stayed in place around her insisted she had the right to draw up a resignation honors list–a list outgoing prime ministers create to nominate supporters, donors, and hangers-on for knighthoods or seats in the House of Lords.

I’m not sure if a knighthood’s worth much, financially speaking, but a member of the Lords can collect £323 for any day they bother to show up, which a lot of them don’t. And they get bragging rights and can get people to call Lord or Baroness Whatsit and wear a very nice ermine robe on dress-up days.

At least it’s very nice if you go for that sort of thing, although it’s a lot like a bridesmaid’s dress: Where can you wear it once the wedding’s over?

That may be why they’re lent to the Lords, not given.

Sorry, did I go off topic there?

Irrelevant photo: a neighbor’s dahlia

Other than the money, the robe, and the bragging rights, I’m not sure what a person gets out of being in the House of Lords, but who’s there matters to the rest of us because they have a political impact. The more of its loyalists a party packs in there, the better. For it, if not for the country.

There’s a certain irony in a party–the Conservatives–adding to the House of Lords after it argued for slimming down the Commons needed because it was too expensive, but that was a while ago and it’s okay because we’ve all forgotten about it.

But we were talking about our most recent ex-prime minister, Liz of the Lettuce. There was a lot of push and pull over whether she should get to submit an honor list–or for that matter whether Boris Johnson, who lasted longer but left office in disgrace and is surely still hoping to bumble back in, should. Rumor has it that the word honor filed a lawsuit at being associated with either of them, but I haven’t been able to confirm that in the responsible press.

Now Buckingham Palace has stepped in to handle the situation in what an anonymous source (this is from the responsible press) described as “a very British way,” telling Truss that she can’t submit a long list. That apparently means she can submit a short one, but at least someone’s setting limits.

How will they do that?

“It will be a case of . . . you don’t want to embarrass the king, do you?” No formal rules govern the system of resignation honors (that may in itself be very British: This is a country with an unwritten constitution, after all) but tradition dictates that the new prime minister doesn’t object to the former prime minister’s nominees. So “don’t embarrass the king”? Tradition allows for that.

As an ex-PM, Truss is also eligible for the £115,000 per year that former prime ministers are allowed to collect in order to fund a private office to handle the public role that’s at least theoretically involved in being a former prime minister, and there was, briefly, a flap about whether 45 days in office justified the money. No one seems to be arguing that she should get the money, but we’ve all gone on to new outrages since then.

We have the attention span of a lettuce lately.

There were (and still are) assorted rumors that the money was a pension. It isn’t.

When Boris Johnson dropped out of the latest contest for prime minister, leaving the way open for Rishi Sunak to waltz in without Conservative Party members voting on their–and our–new leader, speculation was that he did it because he didn’t have enough support.

Not so. It turns out he did have enough support, and he also had some advice (or so people in the know believe) that if he lost to Sunak it would cut into his potential earnings on the international speaking circuit. So to hell with leading the country. Let’s make cash.

Johnson still hasn’t submitted his list of resignation honors. We may have some outrage left when that happens or we may be tapped out by then.

Now that Truss is safely out of office, a former aide’s come forward to say that when she was justice secretary she avoided appearing on BBC’s Question Time by claiming family members had died–ones the aides described as “minor people like aunts and cousins and things.”

Forgive me for getting personal about this, but I’m an aunt. Also a cousin. And a thing. So if you happen to be one of my relatives, please understand that I do not appreciate being killed off, even fictionally, no matter how minor I am in your life or how badly you want to avoid some commitment you made. I’m surprisingly central to my own life, thanks.

Eventually she either ran out of relatives or it all got too obvious and she had to appear on the show.

In his first day or so as prime minister, a photo of Rishi Sunak appeared, looking crisp and tailored and being stalked by someone with a lettuce (complete with googly eyes) on his head. The humor there strikes me as particularly British, although I’m damned if I can explain why. If anyone else can, I’d love to hear it. Sadly, I’ve lost the link. It was on Twitter, I think, which is another way of saying I’ll never find it, and googling Sunak, lettuce, and googly eyes got me nowhere.

And here I thought I had such a good relationship with Lord Google.

Speaking of very British ways…

The 1960s Profumo scandal involved British cabinet ministers, a Russian spy, and a young woman who was involved with all of the above. Newly released files note that MI5 pegged the Russian as a spy when he arrived at the London embassy as an assistant naval attache because he didn’t know much about ships and because he carried an umbrella.

“Russians who frequently carry umbrellas are more likely to have an intelligence function,” someone noted.

Keep that in mind. You never know when it’ll prove useful.

In other political news

A while ago, Jeremy Hunt, currently the chancellor of the exchequer–a.k.a. the guy who’s in charge of the government’s money and on a good day is expected to make taxing, spending, and borrowing match, or at least not set each other on fire–set up a charity (if you’re American, that’s a nonprofit) called Patient Safety Watch to research preventable harm in healthcare. In the year that ended in January 2022, it spent two-thirds of its income–that’s something more than £110,000–paying its only employee, who’s it’s chief executive and who just happens to be Hunt’s former advisor, Adam Smith.

Smith lost his job as Hunt’s advisor in a 2012 lobbying scandal but is now Hunt’s parliamentary aide because we have the attention span of a lettuce.

Hunt set up the charity in 2019 and part-funds it himself. So far, it’s produced zero papers.

Sorry–”appears to have produced” zero papers.

And in the nonpolitical news

Since this is a roundup of the British news, let’s go to some art news from Germany, which for the sake of clarity I should remind you is not in Britain, it’s in, um, Germany.

A painting by Piet Mondrian that’s been hanging in a museum in Dusseldorf since 1980 turns out to be upside down.

Why couldn’t anybody tell? Mondrian was an abstract artist–so abstract that he painted nothing but grids–and he never got around to signing this one, so they didn’t have much to go on, but a photograph of his studio shows it hanging the other way around, so presumably that’s what Mondrian had in mind.

But you know what? In a new show of his work, they’re going to hang it the way it’s been anyway.

A study reports that unborn babies grimace when their mothers swallow capsules packed with powdered kale 20 minutes before an ultrasound. They don’t grimace when the mothers swallow capsules filled with powdered carrots.

Use that information in whatever way suits you.

A study estimates that 20 quadrillion ants live on earth.

How many ants in a single quadrillion? Lots. Enough that there are 2.5 million ants to every human now living.

Use that in whatever way suits you as well.

Covid news: Should we be losing sleep over the new variants?

Posted on October 28, 2022 by Ellen Hawley

If you’re even vaguely awake (or as our former and once again active home secretary would say, if you’re a Guardian-reading, tofu-eating wokeanista), then you’ll know that Covid has some new variants, and that they have good publicity agents. So how much sleep exactly should you lose?

Not as much as some of the nightmare-on-Covid-Street headlines would have you think.

Let’s sort the variants into separate piles and talk about them.

Irrelevant photo: A California poppy. Or since it’s growing in Cornwall and is at least four generations in, maybe by now it’s a Cornish poppy. (That’s a bit of an in joke and I’ll explain it if anyone’s interested.)

The BA variants

BA.2.75 begat BA.2.75.2, because viruses are good at begatting, even if they’re useless at naming their begotten, and since they work under pressure from both our immune systems and the vaccines that are loose in the world, the descendants that survive tend to be the ones that spread most easily or have some sort of hyped up immunity–and .2 does indeed have some of that.

According to Ben Murrell of the Karolinksa Institutet (that’s not a typo; it’s Swedish), “While antibody immunity is not completely gone, BA.2.75.2 exhibited far more dramatic resistance than variants we’ve previously studied. “

In layperson’s terms, that means, “Well, damn.” It also means some of the antiviral treatments given to people who’ve been hit the hardest won’t work against this one, but all is not lost because one still does.

That was what passes for good news. (Don’t go away–there’s more good news later on.) On the other side of the balance, the antibodies running around in the blood of anyone with antibodies (that’d be people who’ve been vaccinated or who’ve had Covid) are only about a sixth as effective.

Still, a sixth means they’re not completely ineffective. This is good, but it’s not the good news I was waving signs about. For that, you have to wait. Or skip ahead.

What’s not known yet is how quickly the variant will spread. It’s in several countries but can claim only a minority of cases, so it may not become dominant. It’s also not known whether it’ll drive up hospitalization rates or how protective the vaccines will be against it

Balancing all that out, I’d say it’s not time to panic yet. If you’ll wait a bit, you can always panic later.

The BQ variants

BQ.1 and BQ.1.1 are not to be mistaken for either meat cooked with a sticky sauce–that’s BBQ–or B&Q, which is a chain of British stores that claims to have everything you need for your home and garden. What my home needs is a good coat of paint, and they do have paint supplies, but the problem is getting the paint and the walls in the right relationship to each other. The last time I tried, the dog and the rug somehow got into the relationship and–

Anyway, no, they don’t really have everything I need.

The BQ variants are making headlines and US influencers are running around saying they’re worse than the CDC is admitting.

The CDC is the Centers for Disease Control, which technically speaking should get a plural, but never mind. What matters is that if the CDC had said they were world-ending, somebody would jump up and say the CDC was trying to panic us all for dastardly reasons of their own. You can’t win this game.

The BQs were begat by BA.5 and last I looked (that was Octover 23) made up 11% of Covid cases in the US. Like BA.2.75.2, they’re pretty good at dodging the neutralizing antibodies we’ve spent so much time and effort developing.

By the beginning of 2023, the BQs are expected to make of 80% of Covid cases. I think that means the world’s Covid cases, but they could be talking about Europe’s. Let’s not split hairs. They spread, probably because of the way they dodge our antibodies. There’s no evidence so far that they’re more severe than the earlier versions or that they’ve completely sidelined the vaccines.

The XBB variants

Finally, we have the XBB variant, which instead of being begotten combines two earlier variants. I’m not going to try to explain that–let’s just say viruses have many ways to mutate–and you don’t really care which variants they were, do you?

XBB is already creating subvariants. You know, XBB.1 and all that mess. By October 20, it had popped up in 26 countries and was collecting headlines calling it a nightmare variant. It seems to spread rapidly and it too knows how to slip past our neutralizing antibodies–even more so than the new BQ and BA variants. The last of the monoclonal antibodies–the one that works on the B and BQ variants–doesn’t work here.

It’s not clear yet whether it causes a more severe form of Covid, but in Singapore, where it’s spread widely and which has a 79% vaccination-and-booster rate and strict control measures in place, it’s been milder. “The number of people dying or in the ICU is really low,” according to Eric Topol of Scripps Research. “Their protection level is really solid.”

What kind of strict measures?

“Facemasks remain compulsory on public transport and in most healthcare facilities. Contact tracing requirements remain in effect for events with more than 500 people. Authorities continue to bar unvaccinated people from dine-in services.” People who test positive are quarantined at home.

There’s no evidence XBB and its kiddies make anybody sicker than the earlier variants, and it’s too early to tell how well the new booster shots will work against it, but educated guesses say they’re still be well worth having.

“We’re going to have another wave,” Topol said. “The question is, how bad is it going to be?”

Can’t remember who Topol is? He’s up a few paragraphs.

On the other hand

Should we all just go out and slit our wrists?

No. It’s messy, it causes pain, and it’s not necessary. The new variants are a problem, but–and it’s a big but (with one T, thank you very much)–neutralizing antibodies aren’t the only insult in our immune systems’ vocabulary. We focus on them because they’re easy to measure, but our immune systems know other ways to get under Covid’s skin–or maybe that’s its spike protein. Or–

You know what? Never mind. Failed metaphor. Move on. Nothing to see here.

Our immune systems have T cells. And B cells. And if they’re English speakers, they’ve still got 24 letters in the alphabet once they use those up. What’s more, people who’ve had Covid have some letterless (as far as I know) immune cells throwing parties in their lungs.

We’re not completely unprotected.

The phrase Immune escape (which I’ve avoided using but which serious people will) has been misinterpreted. It sounds like it means time to panic. It doesn’t.

Especially since multiple articles are telling us about research groups edging closer to a universal (or near-universal–I’ll settle for that) coronavirus vaccine which would, at long last, put an end to this damn pandemic. So put the knife back in the drawer. We can do without the drama, thanks.

The latest thing in conspiracy theories: It’s the news from Britain

Posted on October 7, 2022 by Ellen Hawley

The latest thing in conspiracy theories: It’s the news from Britain

Britain has a special relationship with the US, although Hawley’s Small and Unscientific Survey indicates that only Britain is knows about it. But never mind that. It’s so important that Britain sometimes gives it capital letters: the Special Relationship.

In fairness, Britain hands out a lot of capital letters, so Americans, don’t let that go to your head.

But special relationship or no special relationship, Britain doesn’t like taking second place, even in the production of conspiracy theories, so we’ve come up with a nice one that’s all our own: The security guards who attended King Charles–that’s the monarch formerly known as Prince–at his mother’s funeral used fake hands so they could keep their real ones on the weapons hidden under their coats.

Well, of course they did. I’ve seen photos circulating on TikTok, and they show the security guys keeping a tight grip on their hands, as if they were afraid they’d drop off.

Yes, people do stay up nights to work this stuff out.

The paper I found this in seems to have found it credible enough that they trotted out a security expert to explain why that wouldn’t happen in the UK, although it might, of course, in the US.

Isn’t it interesting what people think of the US? We’re a nation where people could, imaginably, hide an extra pair of arms under their coats.

Irrelevant photo: A pedestrian crossing in Camden, London.

But that’s not what the expert addressed. In the US, he explained–and this comes in the form of an indirect quote from the Metro–“close protection officers are more ‘trigger happy’ . . . but the ‘risk is too high’ in the UK.”

In other words, you might be able to run around shooting people at royal funerals in the US (assuming, of course, that you can find a royal funeral), but you can’t do that in Britain.

No one seems to have asked how long it would take security guys in any country to break their real arms loose if they did need to get trigger happy, but before I’m going to get on board for this one I need an answer.

But let’s move on

Do you ever wonder why so many conspiracy theories are on the loose lately? It’s a desperate effort to make sense of a world that’s falling apart.

That’s not meant as a joke.

So what’s the British government doing to hold it all together? Well, we have a brand new government, cobbled together by the Conservative Party, which still has a hefty majority in Parliament. Already, though, the shine’s coming off it. It–this is the government we’re talking about in case you’ve lost track–announced a new mini-budget that, in the face of a population increasingly desperate about inflation, promised a tax cut for the richest eighteenth of a percent of the population. It would fund that by borrowing money that it would pay back when pigs fly in formation past the Houses of Parliament waving lion-and-unicorn banners and singing “The Marseillaise.”

Why “The Marseillaise”? Irony, that’s why. Their long and less than happy relationship with humans has led pigs to develop a sharp sense of irony.

The pound promptly tanked. That’s the vote that really matters, so the political world came to a rolling boil. MPs in the government’s own party publicly attacked the idea, attacked the prime minister, attacked the chancellor, and attacked Larry the Cat, who in fairness isn’t even in the cabinet.

Cabinet ministers accused MPs of staging a coup.

Larry the Cat accused the government of being stingy with the cat treats.

The prime minister said she wouldn’t back down.

The prime minister repeated that she wouldn’t back down.

The prime minister backed down, but only on the most controversial tax cut, not on other problematic parts of the budget, which I’ll skip over. Come on, do I look like a newspaper? When the details overwhelm the humor, I have to move on.

The prime minister won’t rule out reinstating the tax cut.

Larry the Cat upchucked a lightly used mouse head on the steps of Number 10.

In the meantime, the government that won’t commit to increasing benefits (Americans can translate that welfare and similar programs) in line with inflation. People–and not just the poorest ones–are seriously worried about how to heat their homes, food banks are deluged, and the National Health Service is coming apart at the seams.

And we’re hearing a lot of talk about power cuts this winter.

But compassion isn’t completely missing. I recently stumbled over an expensively printed flier with advice on reducing fuel poverty. Some sponsors are in small enough print that I’m not sure if it’s only from the Cornwall Council or if it’s national as well, but hey, if I had anything to do with it I’d want my name in small print as well.

What does it advise us to do?

Keep warm
Have regular hot meals and drinks
Keep moving
Look after yourself
Take care of your neighbors

Thanks, guys. I don’t know what we’d do without you.

To be fair, they also give us a handful of phone numbers to try, but I wouldn’t hold my breath about any of them solving people’s problems.

So what does the Department for Fiddling While Rome Burns say?

The government’s addressing the important stuff, though. Therese Coffey–the new health secretary who sports an accent in her first name but I can’t be bothered searching the depths of Word to find it–has taken a tough stand on the Oxford Comma.

The what?

I’m not exactly British, so I’m not the best person to ask, but back in that big country on the other side of the Atlantic, I learned to call it a series comma. By either name, it’s the comma you either do or don’t use before the final item in a list. You know, when you write to the health secretary and say either, “I find your advice odd, patronizing, and trivial,” or “I find your advice odd, patronizing [no comma, you’ll notice] and trivial.”

C’mon, this stuff is important.

I won’t try to explain why that’s called the Oxford comma in Britain, mostly since I don’t understand it either, but Coffey’s agin it. (She wouldn’t approve of agin either, which is why it made its way in here.) She’d no more than located her new office and hung up her coat than she told civil servants to “be positive” in their communications with her, to avoid double negatives, and to not use the Oxford comma.

After that hit the headlines, her departmental flak-catchers jumped in and acknowledged that the memo was real but said Coffey hadn’t written it.

“There may have been a bit of over-eagerness” in the content, he, she, they [Oxford comma ahead], or it said.

Wouldn’t it be nice if they were half as eager to shorten the lists of people waiting for medical treatment, fill the National Health Service’s job vacancies, or fix hospital roofs? But those things take money. Oxford commas? They come cheap.

Yeah, but why’d the Conservative’s get a reputation as the Nasty Party?

Gee, I don’t know. I wasn’t here when it happened, but it’s not helped by people like Daniel Grainger, chair of the Young Conservative Network, who arrived in Birmingham for the party convention and tweeted that it was “a dump.”

He’s stepped down pending an investigation, although that may be over a different tweet–one that, sadly, hasn’t hit the headlines.

How’d the party conference go?

Well, a recent study reports that dogs can sniff out whether people are stressed. I haven’t read that the conference center was surrounded by stress-trained canines, but then I haven’t read that it wasn’t. And for all I know, those hands really were fake. Can you prove they weren’t?

Can we go back to economics, please?

Sure. The Ig Nobel Economics Prize went to Alessandro Pluchino and his colleagues for a mathematical explanation of why success so often goes not to the most talented people but to the luckiest.

Irrelevantly but irresistibly, the prize for medicine went to Marcin Jasiński and colleagues for showing that patients treated with cryotherapy–a form of chemotherapy that dries out the mouth, gums, and tongue–have fewer harmful side effects when ice cream replaces the ice chips they usually suck on.

They used Ben and Jerry’s, although I expect the improvement would carry over to other brands.

Bits of good news about Covid

Posted on September 30, 2022 by Ellen Hawley

We’re talking about Covid again, so let’s grab some shreds of good news and pile them up like hamster bedding–only (if I remember my brother’s hamster correctly) not as stale smelling.

Shred number one

A study involving older, high-risk adults showed that nasal irrigation reduced the risk of hospitalization and death from Covid and helped people recover faster.

What does “older” mean if we don’t have a comparison group? C’mon, we all know that in our culture it’s not nice to say someone’s old. They’re trying to be polite. My best guess is, older than the researchers.

Next question: What’s nasal irrigation? An inexpensive and low-tech way of clearing out your sinuses. You squirt a mild sterile saline solution up one nostril, tipping your head so it dribbles helplessly out the other, having found its way via satellite navigation. As the solution falls into the sink, you’ll hear a small voice saying, “You have reached your destination.”

Irrelevant photo: It must be time for another cat photo. This is Fast Eddie, who doesn’t look like he was assembled correctly but was. Really.

Okay, I asked Lord Google what it involves, and I even tried doing it. It’s mildly off-putting but I’ve done worse things in the name of health. It’s entirely survivable.

But let’s go back to the study: Only 1.3% of the subjects were hospitalized, and none died. Compare that to the control group, where 9.47% were hospitalized and 1.5% died. Group one also got better faster and had fewer symptoms hanging on at the end of two weeks.

The inspiration behind the study was 1) that saline decreases Covid’s ability to attach to cells–to the ACE2 receptor, in case you’re taking notes and 2) that the larger a person’s viral load is, the sicker they’re likely to be, so if within 24 hours of testing positive (the study’s designers reasonsed) some of the virus was rinsed out, that might reduce Covid’s damage.

Nasal irrigation is a common practice in Southeast Asia, and interestingly enough death rates from Covid were lower there. That’s not definitive proof, but it’s intriguing enough to make a person design a study around it–if the aforesaid person happens to be in the right line of work, of course.

Irrigation also helps with colds, postnasal drip, sinus headaches, and all sorts of fun stuff. It’s said to improve people’s sense of taste and smell and the quality of their sleep.

I’m starting to sound like a true believer, aren’t I? Sorry. I’ll recover in a minute or two, as soon as I stop this saline solution dribbling out of my left nostril. In the meantime, I can balance things out by admitting that it won’t make you taller or reverse aging.

Shred number two

A small study hints that vaccination may be decreasing the number of people who come down with long Covid. The study comes from the long Covid clinic at the Cambridge University Teaching Hospital, which treats people on the severe end of the spectrum. Between August 2021 and June 2022, it saw a 79% drop in referrals compared to August 2020 and July 2021.

That’s not proof that vaccination’s the cause–it’s only correlation–but it does suggest it.

Other studies also show a decrease, although the numbers have been all over the map. One showed a 15% reduction and another 50%. A third showed “eight of the ten most-commonly reported symptoms were reported between 50 and 80% less often.” I’d translate that into a format that parallels the other studies but somebody glued the pieces in place and I can’t.

The reason the numbers vary so much is that the studies weren’t defining long Covid the same way or following people for the same length of time.

So does catching Covid multiple times increase your odds of getting long Covid? The assumption has been that with each infection, you roll the dice again, taking the same risk each time. But one author of the study expects that previous infections will have more or less the same impact as vaccination and the risk will turn out to diminish after the first infection.

Probably.

Shred number three

The omicron variant may be 20% to 50% less likely to turn into long Covid than the delta variant, depending on a person’s age and how much time has passed since they were last vaccinated.

But–and isn’t there always a but?–because more people caught the omicron variant than the delta, the absolute number of people in the UK who came down with long Covid as a result was higher.

Sorry. That second paragraph was as welcome as a thorny old blackberry cane sneaking into the hamster bedding.

Shred number four

Allergies might offer some protection against Covid. Do you have hay fever, allergic rhinitis, eczema, dermatitis? Be grateful for your bad luck, because you may be 23% less likely to get infected . Got one of those plus asthma? Be grateful twice: It may have down by 38%.

That’s not proof, but it’s an interesting possibility.

Shred number five

A study estimates that in the first year Covid vaccines were available, they prevented 19.8 million deaths worldwide. Unfortunately, though, because of how unevenly they were distributed, the advantage was heavily skewed toward the richest countries.

You knew it wouldn’t all be good news here, didn’t you?

During the first Covid wave, before vaccines were available, shutting schools cut daily deaths by 1.23 per million over 24 days and shutting workplaces cut daily deaths by 0.26 per million over 24 days. (Kids were less likely to get sick but they’re generous little creatures and they do like to share their germs.) For a population of 67 million (which just happens to be Britain’s population), that translates to roughly 82 deaths avoided every 24 days by shutting schools and 17 by shutting workplaces.

Lockdowns and restrictions on public transportation didn’t have as significant an impact. The difference is at least partially attributable to vulnerable people not being able to avoid workplaces and schools.

Shred number six

India and China have approved inhalable vaccines, and many medical manufacturers are chasing their own inhalable versions. Injected vaccines concentrate antibodies in our muscles, which is useful, but we catch Covid by inhaling it, so the theory goes that loading the nose and mouth with antibodies could potentially keep us from spreading it. In other words, it really could end the pandemic.

Potentially. I don’t think the data on either of the new vaccines have been made public yet, so keep watching.

And now your weekly quota of bad-to-ambiguous news

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, head of the World Health Organization, said, “Last week, one person died with Covid-19 every 44 seconds. Most of those deaths are avoidable.”

That quote’s from early September .

“You might be tired of hearing me say the pandemic is not over. But I will keep saying it until it is.”

A week later, he said “We have never been in a better position to end the pandemic. We are not there yet, but the end is in sight.”

However, “If we don’t take this opportunity now, we run the risk of more variants, more deaths, more disruption, and more uncertainty.”

WHO is urging countries to continue testing for the virus, to continue sequencing it, and to vaccinate 100% of the most at-risk groups, including health workers and the elderly.

Britain cancels all news out of respect for the queen

Posted on September 23, 2022 by Ellen Hawley

In case you managed not to notice, the queen died, but that’s not today’s topic. Let’s talk about Britain’s response, which–depending on your point of view–has been either moving and full of pageantry or expensive and over the top.

Let’s go straight to the over-the-top stuff.

News outlets more or less abandoned real news, giving us day after day after day of queen-is-dead coverage, and journalists were driven to such extremes in their efforts to find new angles that on the day of the funeral I found a headline that read, “Viewers left shocked after spider crawls across queen’s coffin during funeral.”

Yes, whatever else you can say, the country’s papers know breaking news when they see it.

Irrelevant photo: Nicotiana–and if it looks like I photoshopped a frowny face into the center, I didn’t. The flower grew that all by its glorious self.

The award for worst managed respectful gesture

Centre Parcs–a chain of holiday villages–first announced that they’d have to kick everyone out on the night of the queen’s funeral because they were closing down. When that got bad publicity, they changed their minds (“We recognise leaving the village for one night is an inconvenience”) but told guests they’d have to stay in their lodges, because the place was still closed.

That led some denizens of social media to call it a hostage situation, which should also get an over-the-top award but we’ve run out. Sorry. Still, it was thoughtful of them to join Centre Parcs in that over-the-top space so they wouldn’t be lonesome.

The company later re-clarified the situation: Guests could walk around but the facilities would be closed. They offered a 17% discount.

Your guess about how they came up with that figure is as good as mine. Given that people go there for the facilities, I’d have thought a 100% refund would be more fitting, but after that the story dropped out of the news.

Gestures that didn’t win awards

From there, the stories get more mundane, but British Cycling–the national body for a sport that I never knew had a national body, or needed one–recommended that no one use their bikes on the day of the funeral.

Cue bikers threatening to cancel their memberships. Then cue the organization backing down. And apologizing. And clarifying that “no domestic events should take place on the day of the State Funeral,” whatever that means.

“Any clubs planning rides on the day of the State Funeral may want to consider adjusting their route or ride timings so they do not clash with those of the funeral service and associated processions.

“However, they are under no obligation to do so.”

In other words, please ignore this letter.

Not to be outdone, the Norwich City Council closed two bike racks from September 9 to September 23, “during the Royal period of Mourning.”

The British are big on capital Letters.

After a flap, the original sign was taken down and replaced with one explaining that the area would be used for “floral tributes.” But the bike racks are still closed.

In London, the overwhelmed Royal Parks Whatever asked people to please stop leaving Paddington Bears and marmalade sandwiches as tributes. Ditto balloons and candles. Flowers were okay, but without the wrappings, please.

The bears and sandwiches come out of a filmed sketch involving the queen, played by herself, having tea with Paddington Bear, who rumor has it was played by an actor.

The supermarket chain Morrisons showed its respect by turning the beeps on their self-service checkout scanners so low that customers couldn’t hear them and couldn’t tell if their purchases had been scanned or not.

On the day of the funeral, most of the big shops shut for at least part of the day. Most movie theaters also closed, although a few screened the funeral for free but as a sign of respect weren’t selling popcorn. Or candy, although it’d be funnier to stop at popcorn.

Cafes and restaurants were mostly closed, but pubs were mostly open. Draw your own conclusions. And Heathrow Airport adjusted its flight patterns and schedule to ensure quiet skies for the funeral.

What happens next?

Most significantly, Heinz ketchup will have to change its label, and so will hundreds of other food and drink brands. Why? Because they’ve carried the queen’s coat of arms on their packaging, which they can only do if they have a royal warrant, but royal warrants die when a monarch does.

A royal warrant? That doesn’t mean anyone’s getting arrested. Companies who supply “goods and services to the royals” can apply for them. So now they all have to apply to the new monarch and prove that the royal household uses their products regularly.

Anytime you feel the need to remember the queen was human, just think of her pouring ketchup on her fries.

Or maybe she had someone to do that for her.

Bank notes will also have to be changed, since they carry an image of the reigning whoever. That’ll take a couple of years. And coins will have to change, along with postage stamps and some flags–the ones outside police stations and in a few other places–since they have the queen’s initials on them.

The royal arms, which are on many a government building as well as on government stationery, may change, but that’s up to the new king. And since MPs and members of the House of Lords swore an oath to the queen in order to take their seats, they’ll have to swear a new one, to the king this time.

How much will all this (plus the pageantry and its attendant security) cost? You know the old saying, “If you have to ask, you can’t afford it?” I’m asking, as are a fair number of other people. The country’s in a cost-of-living crisis–11 million people are behind on their bills and 5 million have gone without food in an effort to keep up with them–and the government’s made it plain that it would cost too much to offer any serious level of support. Besides, it doesn’t believe in that sort of thing.

It’s funny that the things governments don’t want to do are always too expensive but they find a way to manage the things they consider important.

But not everyone’s a monarchist

Mostly, small-R republicans seem to have kept their heads down and waited out the storm. But a handful of people were arrested for publicly protesting the monarchy, some by shouting and some by holding up signs. One was threatened with arrest for holding up a blank piece of cardboard.

In fairness, one protester was later dearrested.

No, I never heard of it either. And at a protest where a number of people held up blank signs, no one was arrested.

But the arrests that were made, what law was that uncer? A recent one that allows the police to limit protests that they think are, or will be, noisy or disruptive, even if they’re peaceful. You could fit a lot of dissent under that leaky umbrella.

The good news is that, although calling for the abolition of the monarchy is technically still treason and carries a life sentence, the law hasn’t been used since 1879.

Prime ministers and oversize vegetables: It’s the news from Britain

Posted on September 9, 2022 by Ellen Hawley

Britain has a new prime minister, but before we get depressed let’s change the subject and talk about the man in Hampshire who grew the world’s longest cucumber–3’ 8”, or 1.12 meters if you prefer. It weighed 17 pounds, or 7.7 kilos. Or quite possibly both.

What’s the point of growing a vegetable that big? Well, you could make 400 cucumber sandwiches out of it, but only if you like cucumber sandwiches made with tasteless cukes and have a few hundred close friends who do.

How do I know it’s tasteless? I don’t. It could be bitter. It could have the texture of cardboard packing material. What I do know (since the article I stole this from said so) is that it’s destined for the compost heap, not the table.

In the meantime, we still have that new prime minister. The last one’s been dumped on the compost heap, but only because we didn’t have the heart to deposit him where he belongs. The current one, I predict, will be as much use as a three-and-a-half-foot cucumber and do considerably more damage. Already she’s put someone who talks about “climate alarmism” in charge of energy and climate change. But then, to be fair, I don’t know that the job description specifies working against climate change. It may not.

Okay, these are blackberries, not cucumbers, and they’re normal size, but this is as close as we get to a relevant photo around here.

What goes into a cucumber sandwich?

Sliced cukes, preferably with the rind cut off. Butter (or cream cheese). Something herby or some black pepper. One recipe (not the one I’m linking to; it had too many popups) suggests a squeeze of lemon, which sounds like it’ll give you soggy bread, but hey, it’s your sandwich so do what you like.

Put all that on white bread–lots of white bread–preferably with the crusts cut off so you don’t mistake your 400 sandwiches for anything colorful. Then cut them into triangles, giving you, um, 1,600 sandwich pieces, and you make a huge pot of tea.

If you arrange the triangles on tastefully bleak white plates, they will be practically invisible.

But forget that. Let’s introduce the bike bus

Kids in a Glasgow primary school can ride the bike bus to school on Fridays.

A bike bus is basically a group of kids and parents moving through traffic like a school of fish. It was started by a parent who’d read about something similar in Barcelona. Because impatient drivers were becoming a problem, the lead bike is now rigged with a gizmo that changes the traffic light at a particularly messy intersection for long enough for 50 or so riders to cross.

Interviews with the kids were predictably informative. One likes ringing his bell. Another likes talking to her friend on the way to school. And a third has a new bike and it’s red and orange.

What’s happening in the rest of the world?

Well, researchers at the University of Michigan (which is not in Britain) have developed a wind turbine blade that can be recycled into gummy bears.

I’m tempted to stop there, leaving you with an image of gummy bears mysteriously falling from the sky in a disorganized gummy rainbow when the blades reach the end of their first life. But (however briefly) I’m having a responsible moment, so I’ll explain.

The blades are made from a mix of glass fibers, a plant-based polymer, and a synthetic polymer. When the blades are ready to be replaced, instead of joining that great wind turbine in the sky, they break down (with a little help from an alkaline solution) into their component parts, which can be used to make new turbine blades, or tail lights, or gummy bears, or sports drinks. To demonstrate how safe that is, one of the researchers, John Dorgan, publicly ate a gummy bear they’d made.

“A carbon atom derived from a plant, like corn or grass, is no different from a carbon atom that came from a fossil fuel,” he said. “It’s all part of the global carbon cycle, and we’ve shown that we can go from biomass in the field to durable plastic materials and back to foodstuffs.”

Turbine blades can be as much as half the length of a football field, making them an awkward addition to a landfill.

Is that a US football field or what the rest of the world calls a football field and Americans insist is a soccer field? I’m not sure. I’m not even sure how the sizes of the two fields compare. What I do know is that the new blades can be recycled endlessly. Unless you eat them.

The urine of the Southeast Asian binturong smells like buttered popcorn. Why is that true? Because they both contain 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline, which smells the same whether it’s at the movies or being excreted onto dead leaves.

Did you need to know that? Probably not, but now that you do you can’t unknow it–at least not unless memory does its loving job of erasing it for you.

You can thank the Encyclopedia Britannica’s “One Good Fact” email newsletter for that gem, and I can’t give you a link because it doesn’t work that way. You’ll just have to trust me on this.

Copyright news

The copyright’s expiring on some of the classic modern novels, and that means you can buy cheap editions online.

What do you get for your money? Less than you’d expect, according to a recent (if February is recent) article. An edition of The Great Gatsby ends mid-paragraph and three pages before the author, F. Scott Fitzgerald, thought it did.

Another edition is dedicated not to Fitzgerald’s wife, Zelda, as the original was, but to “Logan and Olivia Barbrook / May your lives be filled with wonderful stories, great adventures and happily-ever-afters, Love Mummy.”

Which somehow doesn’t sound like Fitzgerald.

One edition changes Fitzgeralds line “At any rate, Miss Baker’s lips fluttered” to “Anyway, Miss Baker’s lipped frizzed.”

Then there’s the cover. One edition showed a couple next to something that looks more or less like a 1980s Dodge Charger. That’s prescient for a book first published in 1925. It’s enough to make your lips frizz.

Let’s go back to oversize vegetables

In Nebraska, Duane Hansen paddled 38 miles down the Missouri River in the hollowed-out 846-pound pumpkin that he grew.

“I probably won’t try this again,” he said, since it was a little cramped in there. However, no politicians were harmed in the setting of what is unquestionably a world record.

In which we see humanity at its best

Somewhere above Europe, two Air France pilots got in a fistfight in the cockpit. The cabin crew heard the noise, went in, and broke up the fight, with one of them staying in the cockpit until the plane landed to keep the pilots in their seats and flying the plane.

The BBC tells us that France’s air investigation body said the airline’s culture “lacked rigor when it came to safety procedures.”

Covid: It ain’t over till it’s over…

Posted on September 2, 2022 by Ellen Hawley

…as the endlessly quotable Yogi Berra may or may not have said.

But forget Berra. The World Health Organization, a.k.a. WHO, isn’t as much fun to quote but it knows how to do footnotes, and that makes it more impressive. In its opinion, the pandemic isn’t over. Between the beginning of 2022 and late August, at least a million people around the world died of Covid.

Or if you want to start counting at the beginning of the pandemic, that’s 6.45 million. Both numbers undercount the damage, but never mind that. Let’s work with what we’ve got.

”We have the tools that can actually prevent these deaths,” said Maria Van Kerkhove, WHO’s technical lead on Covid. “A lot of people are talking about living with COVID. But we need to live with this responsibly. A million deaths this year is not living with COVID. Having 15,000 deaths per week is not living with COVID-19 responsibly.”

In one recent week, more than 5.3 million new cases were reported worldwide, a number that doesn’t include people who registered positive only on a home test. Or who never tested.

“These are huge numbers, and that’s an underestimate,” said Van Kerkhove. “We do see this virus circulating really intensely around the world.”

Irrelevant photo: an orchid

That brings me to the question of why I keep banging on about Covid. Apologies if I’ve gotten boring–Notes isn’t supposed to be mindless, but it is supposed to be a fun read. The problem is that scientists keep coming up with new information. What I’m saying here is, Blame the scientists. If they weren’t so damn good at this, it wouldn’t end up in your inbox.

And if that isn’t a good enough reason, it’s because it still matters. Living with Covid doesn’t have to mean pretending it’s no danger.

Long Covid

Let’s talk about long Covid. Again. Sorry to keep coming back to it, but not long ago someone challenged me on the extent of the problem (my thanks; it was an interesting discussion) and since long Covid’s hard to define and at least as hard to measure, I didn’t have great statistics to offer. But I have started to see some lately, so let’s play with numbers. They all involve money, since it can be counted, and when you’re dealing with something as hazy as long Covid that’s useful. Besides, as we all know, money matters more than life itself.

So let’s talk money: A report from the US estimates that 4 million people are out of work with long Covid, which could mean $170 billion in lost wages. In a year. The report’s author, Katie Bach, said, “If this looks like other post-viral illnesses, some people will recover, but there will be this big stock of people who don’t, and it will just continue to grow over time.”

She called it “a shocking number.”

In mid-2021, the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis estimated that 26% of people with long Covid were out of work or had cut their working hours. An international survey found that 22% of people with long Covid weren’t working and 45% had cut their hours, and a U.K. survey found 16% had reduced their hours and 20% were on paid sick leave. That was between April and May 2021.

Australia’s treasury reports that the country’s lost 3 million working days to long Covid. Or to put that another way, 31,000 people have missed work every day because of it.

So how many people have long Covid? I’m not sure anybody has a reliable count, but the U.S. Centers for Disease Control estimate that 19% of people who’ve had Covid get long Covid symptoms. Unfortunately, the number’s less helpful number than it sounds like, because long Covid’s symptoms range from relatively mild to completely hair-raising and the duration ranges from weeks to the possibility of a life sentence.

Are we having fun yet?

Evidence is growing that people who’ve had Covid face an increased risk of neurological and psychiatric problems as much as two years after their infection. That’s not the final word on the subject, but it comes from a study that followed 1.28 million cases over two years. It does seem to be a strong hint.

The good news? Depression and anxiety are generally gone after two months and are no more common after Covid than after other respiratory infections. And kids are at the lowest risk for kids for later complications.

End of good news.

Adults 64 and under showed an increased risk of brain fog–640 cases per 10,000 people vs 550 cases per. Over 65s? The number went up to 1,540 per compared to 1,230. For dementia (we’re still talking about the over 65s here) it was 450 instead of 330. Psychiatric disorders? That’s 85 instead of 60.

Is there anything can we do about it? Hell yes. I’m going to petition the courts to lower my age.

Does the risk end after two years? We haven’t had enough time for anyone to find that out.

A theory that’s loose on social media holds microclots responsible for long Covid, and some evidence does back that up, but (as one article says) hematologists worry that enthusiasm for the theory has gotten ahead of the data.

Danny Altmann, an immunologist at Imperial College London, said, “We’ve now got little scattered of bits of evidence. We’re all scuttling to try and put it together in some kind of consensus. We’re so far away from that. It’s very unsatisfying.”

But that’s not stopping a few medical groups from offering treatment to remove the clots, and some people with long Covid are desperate enough to try anything, which I can understand. But at least some treatments to get rid of clots risk messing with the blood’s ability to clot, and that (she said, indulging in a mild understatement) would not be a good thing.

How Covid’s changing

Its incubation period—the time between when a person gets infected and when they’re shedding enough of the virus to infect other people—is getting shorter, and the shorter that time that period is, the harder it is for vaccines to keep the virus from spreading.

Yeah, that was news to me too. Measles and rubella have a two-week incubation period, which allows time for a vaccinated person’s immune memory cells to crank out antibodies and keep the person from passing the bug to other people. So vaccines for those diseases stop the spread. In contrast, a Covid vaccine, although it protects the wearer, doesn’t protect the wearer’s friends. Or enemies.

On the bright side, the shorter incubation time means people who test positive might not have to isolate themselves for as long.

Every cloud has a silver lining, but the problem with that is that silver linings are too heavy to float. Watch out for falling silver linings.

Expired tests

You may (or may not) remember that a while back I wrote about the expiration dates on Covid tests. After they pass those dates, I led you to believe (if and only if you read it, of course), they start to call in sick and miss work. Well, I need to update that. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration set the expiration dates in the early days of the pandemic, on the basis of the limited information that was available at the time, but manufacturers are testing aging tests them and some turn out to be good beyond their expiration dates.

How do you know if yours still good?

“To check whether your test kit is still good beyond the printed expiration date, you can search on the FDA’s “At-Home OTC COVID-19 Diagnostic Tests” website.

“Type in the brand name on the FDA site, and a link will appear showing a list of updated expiration dates.

“You may have to check the lot number on your package. For instance, say you’re trying to look up an iHealth COVID-19 test kit with lot number 222CO20208. Scroll down the document to find your lot number, and you’ll find that the original expiration date of Aug. 7 has been extended to Feb. 7, 2023.”

Apologies.

An update on Hafiza Qasimi

In early August, I wrote about Hafiza Qasimi, a woman artist fleeing Afghanistan after the Taliban destroyed her paintings and left her unable to work. The campaign to raise the 10,000 euros she needed to apply for a German visa has reached its goal. This allows her to demonstrate that she can support herself for her first year in the country. (The amount will be raised to 11,208 in January.)

In the meantime, Qasimi has reached Tehran. I have no idea how she did that. In Afghanistan, women aren’t allowed to either travel or leave the country unless they’re with their husband or a male a relative. But she managed it, she’s safe, and she’s been offered a three-month residency at a German art gallery is she can get that visa.

The group supporting her is trying to raise more than the 10,000 euro minimum so that she can afford health insurance and other basics. They’re also working with her on a grant application that would allow her to study at art school.

“This,” they say, “will provide her with the space she needs, as a free woman, to renew and develop her artistic work. We are full of confidence and look forward with Hafiza to the future.”

Her brother, who lives in Germany, will be flying to Tehran to see her for the first time in eight years.

If you want to contribute to the fundraising campaign, any amount will be welcome. And if you don’t (or would love to but can’t), that’s okay. Do what you can where you can and wish her joy in her freedom.

How to enjoy British politics: Imaginary menu items, hard hats, and triple negatives

Posted on August 26, 2022 by Ellen Hawley

As Britain staggers unenthusiastically in the direction of its new prime minister, whoever that turns out to be, the two contenders are telling us how gloriously they’ll govern the country (if give the chance) while ignoring small things like the inflation crisis, the sewage crisis, the housing crisis, the drought crisis, the energy crisis, the environmental crisis, and the crisis crisis.

But one of them, Rishi Sunak, works harder at it. Because he’s ridiculously rich and people know it, he has to prove he could not only govern but is in touch with the real world.

In pursuit of that image, he recently told the media that he likes McDonald’s breakfast wraps. Isn’t that the kind of thing the common people eat, after all? He and his daughter eat them regularly, he told the media.

Not anymore. Someone did some digging and found that McDonald’s hasn’t sold them for two years.

His campaign team leapt to his defense by saying that, um, yeah, well, he ate them when they were on the menu but “he’s barely seen his kids in the last two and a half years.”

Thanks, folks. That really humanized your guy.

He’s also been spotted struggling to figure out how contactless card payments happen (he held the card in front of a barcode scanner) and filling up a car that turned out to be borrowed. His advisors must’ve told him common people do stuff like that. I don’t think he’s been spotted pretending to wash his clothes at a laundromat (called a launderette in Britain) or playing at being a food bank client, but there’s still time.

Irrelevant photo: a neighbor’s dahlia

The strain between Sunak and his former boss, the multi-vacationing prime minister Boris Johnson, brought us a headline I can’t help but admire, since it manages a triple negative: “PM Refuses to Deny He Is Not Taking Sunak’s Calls.”

In the interests of complete transparency, that’s from the print edition. Once it went online, the PM failed to deny, but it’s still a triple negative.

But let’s talk about hard hats, because politicians just love to put them on their heads and pose for the press. It makes them look like they’re doing something real. Or at least like they might at any moment.

Knowing that, I asked Lord Google about hard hats and politicians and he led me to a Buzzfeed article that’s well worth a visit: “21 Photos of Politicians in Hard Hats Pointing at Things.”

Call me naive, but I hadn’t noticed what they did after putting on the hats, but I will from now on. So go ahead, follow the link. You know you want to.

I’d tell you what Sunak and Truss are doing and proposing about real-world issues, but it’s all too depressing. And in case it sounds like I think Truss would be less evil or even less absurd, I don’t. I’m damned if I know which will be worse. Both. Either. Sunak just happens to have been funnier lately. I struggle to find a laugh in the Truss stories.

The politics of blood

Scotland’s the first country on the planet to provide free universal access to period products, which is a great thing to do, and in that spirit the Tay region appointed someone to promote the dignity of menstruation.

Who’d they choose?

A man.

Why?

Because of his long experience of monthly bleeding, of course. And his background in tobacco sales and as a personal trainer.

The man in question defended his appointment by saying, “I think being a man will help me to break down barriers, reduce stigma, and encourage more open discussions.”

I have little doubt that it also helped him rise up the list of nominees. It happens so quietly and so often, and we’re so used to it, that we barely notice. Until suddenly something like this comes along and we wonder how that happened.

The politics of swans

Rumor has it that all swans in Britain belong to the queen, but as so often happens rumor has it wrong. Or partially wrong. She owns the swans that aren’t marked as belonging to someone else, and that gives her the title seigneur of the swans.

Is seigneur a masculine noun? I’m reasonably sure it is. My French was never impressive, but maybe we’d want to make her the seigneuse of the swans. Or maybe, being a queen and all, she’s above gender.

That’ll upset the anti-woke warriors. Don’t tell Liz Truss.

The queen’s staff includes a swan warden.

The tradition of marking–or for that matter, owning–swans goes back to the middle ages, when they were a status symbol and aristocrats wanted to have a pair or three paddling on their rivers and on grand occasions carried onto their dinner tables (to be clear: that’s as food, not as guests), but the right to own them could only be granted by the king and only went to the most important landowners, who marked their ownership by nicking the birds’ beaks in distinctive patterns, which wouldn’t have been a lot of fun for the birds. Or the people doing the nicking.

Owning swans is so deeply embedded in the monarchy that it observes a yearly swan upping. Or maybe it does a swan upping. Or, well, I’m not sure, since I’ve never upped a swan. It sounds like some disreputable thing you’d do in a back alley, not on a river. But I do know that the staff does/observes/whatevers it, not the queen herself. And it does happen on a stretch of the water, since that’s where the birds are.

If you want to learn about swan upping you’ll find an article about it in the Smithsonian magazine.

The politics of money

Britain’s fastening its frayed seat belt and bracing itself for inflation to hit 18% or so, and people who aren’t in Rishi Sunak’s tax bracket are feeling the pinch already, since prices are up 10% from a year ago.

An assortment of pointing fingers blame the war in Ukraine, Brexit, Covid, the energy crisis, and workers demanding pay increases. If you read enough explanations, you’d be forgiven for thinking that they’re blaming our current inflation on inflation. What’s the cause of inflation? Higher prices on goods from abroad, they answer. Increased cost of supplies. A shortage of workers willing to take low-paid jobs, etc.

In other words, inflation.

The government–such as it is until we have a new prime minister or the outgoing one comes back from vacation and is jolted awake by his wallpaper, causing him to remember that he’s still the prime minister and is expected to pretend he cares–

Where were we? The government and the contestants in the pre-prime ministerial boxing ring are making a show of pretending they can stop the inflationary cycle by blocking the pay increases unions are demanding, in response to which the unions that aren’t already on strike are making noises that hint they could be soon.

Which is why a headline saying the average pay of chief executives for Britain’s 100 biggest companies drew my eye went up by 39% last year. That gives them, on average, a take home pay of £3.4 million. Per year. Which is 109 times what the average British worker makes.

In 2020 it was a modest 79 times the average.

I don’t believe that includes bonuses. Or perks. And we won’t get into what shareholders make.

But it’s okay, because that doesn’t contribute to the inflationary spiral.

How does executive pay get set? Well, children, I’m glad you asked, because at least some of the time, and quite possibly all of it, the pay of one chief exec gets set by chief execs from other companies, who act as non-executive directors on the boards of companies where they’re not CEOs. And of course they get paid for that.

This comes to light–bear with me while I take a step sideways–because Britain’s privatized water companies are in the news lately. We’re in a serious drought, drawing attention to the 3.2 billion liters of water that leak from the water companies’ pipes every day. That would fill 1,237 Olympic-sized swimming pools but first you’d have to convince the water to jump into them instead of running pointlessly down the nearest gutter.

The water companies have also been dumping raw sewage into the sea, winning the hearts of surfers and swimmers throughout this beshittened isle. Beaches do not have an exemption. So when, say, United Utilities, which is in charge of leaking northwest England’s water and sewage into places it’s not supposed to go, pays its CEO £3.2 million a year, that has a way of making headlines, and even more so when he also gets paid to sit on the remuneration committee at BAE systems.

Other water company execs sit on other boards, and on the committees that set pay. One is paid £115,000 for sitting on the International Airlines Group board and another a measly £93,000 for sitting on the Centrica board.

Please be sympathetic. It’s not easy to live on just one CEO salary. A person needs those little extras.

What’s happening in the rest of the world?

The Japanese government wants people to drink more booze.

That goes against the tide–most governments are discouraging drinking–but alcohol sales are linked to taxes, and taxes are linked to, um, you know, money. In 1980, alcohol accounted for 5% of tax income. In 2011, that was 3%, and in 2020, 1.7%.

Get out there and drink, people. It may not be good for you, but it’s patriotic.

In New Zealand, a seal used the cat flap to break into a marine biologist’s house, traumatizing the cat but otherwise doing no damage. The marine biologist wasn’t home, though, leaving his cat, his wife, and his kids to deal with the seal.

“This is really the only family emergency where it would be useful to have a marine biologist in the house,” he said.

The seal was returned to the sea. The cat is receiving therapy and multiple cat treats and is lobbying for one of those high-tech cat flaps that keeps out unchipped intruders.

Since we’re talking about water, let’s talk about the news that sponges sneeze.

No, not those plasticky things sold as sponges but the real ones that grow on the seabed. They clear their filtration systems of assorted gunk (sorry for the scientific terminology, but you’re tough; you can handle it), shooting it out through small pores called ostia. It takes anywhere between 20 and 50 minutes for a single sneeze, but what else has a sponge got to do with its time? It doesn’t have to punch a clock or catch a train, so why not luxuriate in a long, slow, cleansing sneeze.

The sponges coat the gunk in mucus before they expel it, which temps nearby fish to eat it, proving, in case you were even in doubt, that nature is disgusting.

Your heart-warming stories for the week

One: During the pandemic, a ransomware group called Maze promised not to attack health organizations. Sweet, right?

But between last April and the end of June, though, attacks on healthcare organizations rose by 90% compared to the same months the year before. Or I assume it’s the year before. A typo has that reading “compared to the same period in 2022.”

Somebody tell me this is still 2022, please. I’m starting to feel a little dizzy.

Anyway, that’s what you get for telling ransomware companies (and the rest of the population) that the pandemic’s over. They were playing nice for a while there. Really they were.

That didn’t quite warm your heart? Okay.

Two: The Patmos library in Jamestown, Michigan, was the focus of a year-long campaign by the Jamestown Conservative group, which wanted LGBTQ books taken off its shelves. The books made up, after all, a whopping .015% of the collection. As measured in number of titles, I assume, not weight or word count or font size.

As the Jamestown group explained its objection, “They are trying to groom our children to believe that it’s OK to have these sinful desires. . . . . It’s not a political issue, it’s a Biblical issue.”

The library refused to get rid of the books and in a recent election lost its funding.

Someone or other asked the board president if it was a wake-up call.

“A wake-up call to what? To take LGBTQ books off the shelf and then they will give us money? What do you call that? Ransom? We stand behind the fact that our community is made up of a very diverse group of individuals, and we as a library cater to the diversity of our community.”

Two Jamestown residents responded by starting GoFundMe pages, which in four days raised $59,000 and $2,900, making a total of, um, something larger than either number alone.

Last I looked, the larger campaign had raised just short of $156,000 and the smaller one had raised over $6,000.

The tax money the library lost came to $245,000, but the money that’s been raised should keep it open until it can work out a plan, which will probably involve getting tax support on the ballot in a second election.

BookRiot–a large online site dedicated to books–is calling on readers and writers to support the campaigns and “send a strong message that these tactics don’t work — that they can backfire and provide the library with more support and more funding. And hopefully, next time a book banning group considers defunding the library, they’ll remember Patmos Library.”

And from the Department of Gastronomical Karma…

…comes the news that the US pizza chain Domino’s thought it could challenge Italian pizza makers on their home turf. The theory was that people will eat anything–even American pizza–if it’s delivered to their door. This turned out not to be true. All its Italian branches have now closed and the company that held the franchise is filing for bankruptcy.

Notes from the U.K.

Exploring the spidery corners of a culture and the weird stuff that tourist brochures ignore.

Category Archives: News

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How to enjoy British politics: Imaginary menu items, hard hats, and triple negatives