Charlotte Hamrick, at Zouxzoux: Poetry, Prose, Photography, has added a series on writers who bake. And since this recipe’s mine, I’m just vain enough to reblog it.
The site’s well worth exploring.
Writers Who Bake: Ellen Hawley
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Category Archives: Other Stuff
How to turn a Covid cluster into an outbreak
Until recently, the part of Britain I live in had very few Covid cases. Now we have a cluster of them. Isn’t progress wonderful? It’s not a huge cluster, but then no outbreak starts out huge. It scares the antibodies out of me.
So how’s it being handled?
The nearby secondary school sent one whole year group home when I’m not sure how many kids tested positive. Following government guidelines, they treat each year group as a bubble, having them enter through different doors and eat at different times and keeping them as physically separate as possible. The theory is that if the outbreak’s in one year group, the others should be safe.
You can believe that if you like.
And after school, as my neighbor reminds me, they go home. Her kids are in different bubbles in school–a primary school, but the reality’s the same. The minute they get home, they jump on each other, wrestle their way across the living room floor, and hold a germ exchange.
Only she didn’t call it the living room. That’s American. She also didn’t say anything about a germ exchange.
Irrelevant photo: St. John’s wort, getting ready to bloom, but not at this time of year.
The point, though, is that the bubbles leak–probably at school and definitely at home. And bubbles that leak aren’t bubbles. They’re something else. Cups, maybe. Things with sides and a bottom but no top because that’s how you pour the tea into yourself.
Or not the tea, the germs.
When the school didn’t have enough teachers to keep going, it sent everybody home to keep up with their lessons online. At least, those who have internet access.
Don’t get me started. You know what I’ll say.
Some of the kids were told to self-isolate–probably the ones who’d shared a leaky bubble with someone who was known to have the virus. Their families, though, were told they didn’t have to to self-isolate unless their kid became symptomatic.
How are kids who share a bedroom supposed to self-isolate? Well, you take masking tape and make a line down the middle of the room, and you tell the germs, in the tone of voice you use when the kids have gotten into your secret stash of chocolate, to stay on their own side.
One of the many problems with all this is that people are infectious before they become symptomatic. Some people never become symptomatic and they’re infectious anyway. And people are even more infectious if they live in a country led by an incompetent, corrupt government. I can’t explain that medically, but it does happen.
Back to the school, though: No one wants to tell all the students’ families, or even just the families with kids in that first infected age group, to go into quarantine. Because that’s be a lot of people.
Which is why I worry we’ll be looking at a bigger local flareup soon.
Meanwhile, the county government reminds us to wash our hands and maintain social distancing. Which is better than climbing into each other’s pockets and poking our heads out once a day to ask if the pandemic’s over but doesn’t take into account what it’s like to share a house or apartment or a life with actual human beings. We breathe the same air. It goes into our lungs and it goes out. If someone has the virus, the odds are good that everyone will trade it. It’s always looking for new lungs to explore and conquer, no matter how clean our hands are.
On the other hand, clean hands are very nice things to have.
No one knows for sure where our cluster of cases started, but someone told me today that it traces back to a kid who came home from university. His parents wandered all over town with no idea that they’d been infected and his mother’s sure she infected half of Bude and feels terrible about it.
Whether she’s right or not doesn’t matter, really. It does remind us–or it should–that we don’t know if we’re infectious so we all need to act as if we are. Because we can feel great and still make people around us sick.
And it’s yet another reminder that this lockdown has as many holes in it as the school bubbles.
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A third vaccine, the Oxford Astra-Zeneca vaccine, has reported its accuracy level: It’s 62% but could go up to 90% if the first shot uses a lower dose. (No, I can’t explain it either.) It’s also cheaper than the first two and can be stored in an average refrigerator, and Astra-Zeneca has said it will forgo any profit on it.
Even before that was announced, though, the health secretary told us that if approval comes in time the National Health Service would start vaccinating people before Christmas. Initially, family doctors will immunize the most vulnerable, and NHS staff will be vaccinated at work. Mass vaccination centers will be set up.
That sounds startlingly as if someone somewhere had an actual plan, but the grapevine tells me that the local doctors’ office hasn’t been contacted about this. They have only the vaguest idea how it will work and what they’re supposed to do or how.
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Preliminary studies indicate that mouthwashes containing cetylpyridinium chloride (CPC to its friends) can, under laboratory conditions, kill the coronavirus in thirty seconds. But as Donald Trump so famously informed us, so can bleach. So can nuclear weapons, although that hasn’t been verified in a lab. You know what scientists are like about setting off nuclear weapons in their labs. The few who’ve done it have had problems reconstructing their notes.
A darning needle could also, at least potentially, kill the virus, but viruses are small and stabbing them isn’t easy, as the human immune system has found to its cost.
Don’t think about that too hard. I do understand that the human immune system doesn’t come equipped with darning needles. Let’s call it a metaphor and move on quickly.
With all of this, the problem is what you do with the information. How do you get your chosen virus-o-cide and the virus to meet in the right situation? Take mouthwash: Do you pinch the virus between two fingers and dunk it in the mouthwash? Do you spend your day with a mouthful of the mouthwash and hope that anything you breathe in decides to go for a swim? This isn’t going to be simple.
As you may have figured out, I am–and the world is in my debt for this–not a scientist. Someone may yet find a use for mouthwash in humanity’s fightback against this invisible predator. It’s safe, it’s available, and as medical interventions go it’s cheap.
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Finally, a piece non-Covid news: Donald Trump’s lawyers filed a lawsuit in a Michigan court claiming that Democratic-leaning parts of Michigan had suspiciously high voter turnouts. This was all supposed to link back to voting machines and computer programs and Hugo Chavez.
And to prove they’d done their research carefully, they listed a number of localities in Minnesota instead of Michigan.
Chavez probably moved them before the election for this very purpose. If he wasn’t already dead by then.
The Skeleton Army and the Salvation Army
The Salvation Army was founded as a London mission in 1865, offering food and shelter to the down-and-out, the poor, and the very, very drunk. The Skeleton Army was founded by people who enjoyed a good drink and a fight, and in the 1880s and 1890s it harassed the other army.
The Salvation Army came first, so let’s start with them: According to one account, its goal was to wage war on poverty and religious indifference, which testifies to humanity’s long and history of waging war on things that can’t be shot, slashed, or speared.
And there I was thinking all that war against abstractions and inanimate objects started with the U.S. declaring war on drugs.
Never mind. The Sally wasn’t the first organization to fall in love with a bit of overblown rhetoric, and it quickly took on a military structure, complete with uniforms, recruits, ranks, and marching bands.
Irrelevant photo: An October seed pod. A friend thinks they’re from an iris, in which case I’ll guess a yellow flag, which grows wild.
The Sally’s own website doesn’t talk about warfare but about saving souls and relieving “the Victorian working classes from poverty. In Booth’s eyes [Booth being the founder], this involved morality, discipline, sobriety and employment.”
In other words, unlike the unions and proto-unions of the period, they didn’t see the causes of poverty as low pay and killingly long hours, they were immorality and drinking.
Not to mention gambling and salacious entertainment.
Within the Salvation Army, women’s ranks–and this was radical for the period–were equal to men’s, and women played a powerful role in the organization. Although having said that, it was started by two people, Catherine and William Booth. I’ve put her name first because I’m like that, but I’m a minority of one in that. He’s credited as the founder and Catherine sometimes gets a mention–and not always by name but just as “his wife.” She may have played a secondary role–I’m not sure–but even if she didn’t, he was the Methodist minister in the family, and if that wasn’t enough he carried a Y chromosome, along with the physical oddities that follow from it, so he walked around with neon arrows pointing him out as the important half of the couple.
Still, I’m writing that from a contemporary point of view. For the time, the organization was startlingly equal.
The world they campaigned in was a brutal one. Industrialization meant cities and towns had grown massively, and people’s hours, pay, and working conditions were, literally, killing.
And in spite of the way the language is changing, literally there doesn’t mean figuratively. It means the hours, pay, and working conditions killed people. And crippled them.
Housing was overcrowded, germs hadn’t been so happy since the Crimean War, and beer and gin were cheap, so people drank. Sometimes that was all that got a person through one day and into the next.
Into that setup marched the Salvation Army, not to quietly establish soup kitchens and wait for people to come eat and get preached at but to march down the street, thumping the drum, playing the tuba, waving banners, and preaching against the evils of et cetera.
Et cetera can be extremely evil if left unchecked.
This won them both recruits and enemies. Plenty of people wanted a drink and a dance and a fight.
Along England’s south coast, this response coalesced into a group that called itself the Skeleton Army. Chris Hare, a historian from Worthing, one of the Skeleton hotspots, traces their origin to groups of Bonfire Boys–working class young men who raised hell on Bonfire Night, as well as on Mayday and any other occasion that gave them the opportunity. They didn’t bother with ranks or uniforms, but they did sometimes wear yellow ribbons in their caps or sunflowers in their buttonholes.
No, I don’t know how either. Maybe sunflowers were smaller back then, or buttonholes were tougher.
They also took the Salvation Army’s songs and wrote rowdy lyrics to them. Fair enough. The Sally had taken popular secular songs and reworked the lyrics to suit their purposes, so they were only stealing what had already been stolen.
Skeleton mobs attacked the Salvation Army, throwing paint-filled eggs, dead animals, burning coals–whatever came to hand. Except for the eggs. Those took planning, because getting paint into an egg and keeping it there long enough to throw? That takes work. In fact, how you do it is a deeper mystery than anything the established religions have yet cooked up. But never mind, the eggs appear in more than one telling and seem to have been real.
Where were the town’s respectable people while all this was going on? Unhappy not about the Skeleton Army but about the Sally. Individually, they wrote letters to the newspapers, worrying that the Salvation Army would give their towns a bad reputation and drive visitors away.
As for the religious establishment, it preferred its religion inside the church, not bothering people on the street corner. And landowners and industrialists had an interest in keeping their workers drunk and if not happy at least not demanding higher pay and forming unions.
The Salvation Army was anything but revolutionary, but it offered enough prospect of change to worry the powers-that-were.
Collectively, they were glad to look the other way when the Skeleton Army broke up Salvation Army events.
To the extent that the police got involved, they were likely to blame the Salvation Army for any uproar. In Worthing, when one “Salvationist applied to the bench for a summons against those who had assaulted him,” he was told,” ‘You know what you do provokes others to interfere with you, and then you come to us for protection.’ ”
In Eastbourne, the mayor and the brewers endorsed the Skeleton Army. In Torquay, the local government banned marching music on a Sunday. It attracted troublemakers, so they arrested the marchers.
Attacks on the Salvationists–as the articles I’ve read call them–increased, and the women, especially the women in authority, were the primary targets.
Are you surprised?
One woman, Sussanah Beaty, was killed.
There were riots in Exeter, Worthing, Guildford, and Hastings, and brawls in 67 towns and villages. From the 1880s to the early 1890s thousands of the Sally’s officers were injured.
But by the early 1890s, the police became more likely to arrest attackers. Opposition began to die down and the skeleton army faded away.
After that, the story isn’t half as interesting, so we’ll abandon it there.
Sweary parrots and who’s allowed to be gay, lesbian, bacon, & tomato: It’s the news from Britain
Eric Trump, who’s a son of a Donald (and has nothing to do with Britain–sorry) came out to the world on Fox and Friends. He said, “The LGBT+ community, they are incredible. You should see how they come out in full force for my father every single day. I’m part of that community, and we love the man, and thank you for protecting our neighborhoods and thank you for protecting our cities.”
In case you’re not clear on what the LGBT+ community is, the letters stand for gay, lesbian, bacon, and tomato, and he didn’t get the kind of welcoming reception that a new member might hope for. As a community, we don’t get to vote on our members any more than, say, redheads do, and I’ll let you in on one of our secrets: We may not all like each other and we may not all agree with each other, but if you want to make everybody in your nearest gay bar love you, announcing yourself as a son of a Trump isn’t your best bet.
The son-of-a-Donald’s welcome at Trump HQ–and I admit, I’m having to guess here, because they didn’t take to Twitter over it–was just about as warm, and in no time at all Eric had issued a clarification: He’s happily married. To his wife. Who’s a woman, in case that wasn’t clear. And no, he’s not bisexual. He’s also not lettuce, bacon, or tomato. He got mixed up. As people do so easily. In the heat of the moment, anyone could forget what sex they’re attracted to.
The GLBT+ community breathed a sigh of mayonnaise-flavored relief.
You can’t make this stuff up. I try, really I do, but it’s just not the same.
Irrelevant photo: wall pennywort. Although if you’re looking for a bit of relevance here, the gay liberation movement started at the Stonewall Inn, in Manhattan.
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Now for the important stuff: Tattooed skin doesn’t sweat as much as untattooed skin. Heat tattooed and untattooed sections of your anatomy (assuming you have a tattooed part–or an untattooed one) and they’ll start to sweat at the same point, which suggests that the nerve signals are working in the same way, but the inked part kicks out less sweat.
Does it matter? I have no idea. It just seemed like something you might need to know.
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Scientists have created a super-enzyme that degrades plastic six times faster than normal.
Remember normal?
No, me neither.
The enzyme’s derived from bacteria that evolved naturally, and it eats plastic. It could be used to recycle old plastic bottles into new plastic bottles, which can’t be done currently. Even with our current use patterns, that would mean we’d need less new plastic in the world.
PET currently takes hundreds of years to break down and causes all sorts of trouble along the way. (PET, by the way, is not your dog. It’s one kind of plastic, and like most of earth’s creatures, we end up breathing, eating, and drinking micro-bits of the stuff as it’s on its slow way toward degradation, and I know that sounds judgmental, but I don’t mean it that way. Plastic isn’t just in the oceans but in the soil, where it kills ants, mites, larvae, and all sorts of tiny things we don’t like to think about but that the food chain, awkwardly, depends on.)
Did I really leave all that in parentheses? I wonder why.
The new enzyme can break the stuff down in a few days and be happy in its work. The process is still too slow to be commercially viable, but the developers are hoping it’ll be in use within a couple of years.
They’ve also combined it with enzymes that break down cotton, which means it could be used to recycle mixed fabrics.
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One of the odd byproducts of the pandemic is that people are using less cash and the Royal Mint (yes, there is a Royal Mint; it’s not something you eat; it creates coins) is going to stop making £2 coins for at least ten years and with 2p coins for some other length of time.
2p? That stands to two pence. It’s pronounced to pee, and it’s not a verb, it’s a noun. And no one thinks that’s funny, so stop smirking.
The mint has 26 times more £2 coins than it wants and 8 times more 2p coins. And it’s not allowed to give them away, although that could solve its problem.
In 2010, cash was used in six out of ten sales. By 2019, that had fallen to three out of ten. I don’t have post-pandemic statistics, but the demand for money from cash machines fell by 71% between early March to mid-April.
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The Irish Supreme Court just ruled that the sandwich chain Subway’s bread isn’t bread–it has too much sugar.
This went to court (predictably enough) because someone with a Subway franchise wanted to be exempt from a tax on the grounds that bread is a staple food. No such luck. To be a staple, the sugar couldn’t be more than 2% of the weight of the flour. By that measure, Subway’s bread is 10% sugar.
Yeah, but what if we weigh all the ingredients in the sandwich, not just the flour, and throw in an old hiking boot? Then it’s less than 2% sugar.
Sorry, it’s still not bread.
Would you like bacon, lettuce, and mayonnaise on your donut?
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The island of Niue is considering abandoning its current side of the international dateline and moving to the other one. The line runs just west of Niue, and that means the residents live their entire lives in a different day than New Zealand.
This matters because Nuieans are New Zealand citizens and a healthy chunk of the island’s population leaves Niue and moves there. So once your head stops spinning, this makes a kind of sense. The dateline is arbitrary anyway, and it’s not a straight line, so this won’t really bend it out of shape. Nuieans won’t even have to pack up their books and the dishes for the move.
If anyone figures out how to shorten 2020 even half as easily, please let me know. It hasn’t been a great year.
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A zoo in Lincolnshire has adopted the tactics of many a frustrated teacher, separating not troublesome students but sweary parrots.
The Lincolnshire Wildlife Centre has some 200 gray parrots, and when five new ones joined the flock they generously shared an extensive knowledge of swear words.
“We are quite used to parrots swearing, but we’ve never had five at the same time,” the park’s CEO said. So the bad kids have been sent into exile–which is actually quite a serious thing, since parrots are highly social. Or at least they’ve been separated so they don’t encourage each other. I can only hope they’re allowed to mix with some of the more prudish parrots.
The CEO also said people find it amusing when parrots swear, leading the Chief Officer in Charge of Bad Language to say, “So I don’t know what his fucking problem is.”
Covid, the Great British Bake Off, and other pandemic news
Every country has cultural institutions that it can’t function without. In Britain, one of them is the Great British Bake Off, a TV show where, um, people bake.
It’s riveting.
So how are they handling filming during the pandemic? The entire cast and crew went into isolation together in a hotel. That meant 20 hotel staff, 80 members of the cast and crew, and 20 kids, chaperones, and dog walkers.
So yes, they’d pared it down to the essential roles.
Everyone involved had to isolate themselves for nine days beforehand, taking three Covid tests, and then the producers had to work out ways to get everyone to the hotel without using public toilets.
Dirty dishes. The part they don’t show you on those baking shows.
How’d they do that? I’d love to know. I’ve walked enough public footpaths to know that Britain’s full of hedges. Admittedly, they hide you from only one half of the country at a time, but at a certain point you convince yourself that that’s good enough. I doubt the Bake Off resorted to that, but whatever they did, their precautions meant everyone could crawl all over each other if they wanted to, although that’s not really what baking’s about. Or the show, come to think of it. But all that care did allow them to pose shoulder to (gasp) shoulder and to appear maskless.
These days, that’s quite shocking.
They shot for six weeks, working two days on and two days off. I don’t know if the dog owners walked their own dogs on their days off.
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No Covid update would be complete without the latest mention of England’s test and trace system tripping over its own feet: In a short stretch of time between late September and early October, it lost track of 16,000 cases. The people were informed of their test results, but not only weren’t the cases counted as part of the national statistics, their contacts weren’t notified.
But don’t let’s get grumpy about it. We’re only dealing with a life-threatening disease that we don’t have any effective treatments for, and everyone makes mistakes. Look on the bright side, as Money Python so wisely counseled: As the number of Covid cases rises, a health minister and hereditary peer, Lord Bethell, assured us that when Britain looks back on this time it will be “extremely proud” of its response to the pandemic.
Not to mention amazed. Absolutely amazed.
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Meanwhile, to prove he was fit to work, Donald Trump appeared in photos from the hospital, maskless and signing what looks like a blank sheet of paper.
As of a week or so ago, more Americans had died from Covid than died in World War I.
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As seems to be true of everything about the pandemic, nothing’s certain yet, but a large-scale study is looking into whether antibodies to those colds that kids trade with such enthusiasm might be protecting them against Covid. Covid is a coronavirus. So are a fifth of those boring old colds, which may mean there’s some cross reactivity between them.
Adults get coronavirus colds every two or three years. Kids get them five or six times a year, so some 60% of them have coronavirus antibodies. But even before the British population had been exposed to Covid, some 6% already had antibodies that recognized Covid–possibly because of those cold germs.
The question is whether the antibodies protect against Covid or whether their presence explains why some patients’ immune systems overreact to the disease in life-threatening ways. The study’s looking at both possibilities.
If they’re protective, that raises the hope of finding a vaccine against all coronaviruses, covering Covid, colds, and the next pandemic.
Assuming the next pandemic comes in the form of a coronavirus.
The scarier possibility is related to a small number of kids who get the virus, get better, and then have intense inflammation and multi-organ failure. If their antibodies are the problem, what’s happening is called antibody dependent enhancement. It happens with dengue fever. If you had one strain and got better but then catch a different strain, you can get seriously sick. Your immune system, instead of being primed to fight the disease, makes things worse.
It’s gotten in the way of efforts to make a dengue vaccine.
Can we go with scenario one, please? I like scenario one.
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The British plan for vaccinating the population–whenever that becomes possible–is to vaccinate something less than half of it. The priorities will be first care home residents and workers, second people over 80 and health and social care workers, and third anyone over 75. After that come people over 50, then everyone else goes in a grab bag and Boris Johnson will reach in and pull them out one at a time. We’re all grateful that it won’t be Donald Trump. God only knows where those hands have been.
No. The part about the grab bag isn’t serious. I’ve learned not to take anything for granted. I’m still recovering from a couple of people who thought I was serious about the Druids worshiping the Great Brussels Sprout.
Kids will not be vaccinated.
The plans are still preliminary.
Problematically, any vaccine’s likely to be most effective on the young–and all or most of them are being tested on younger people. It’s unclear how much they’ll protect the old and the frail, so social distancing will need to continue.
Covid, singing, and the London Marathon: It’s the pandemic news from Britain
The London Marathon was supposed to happen last April but it was postponed until October 4 because of the pandemic, and somewhere in between those two dates they decided to make it a virtual marathon. A handful of top runners will follow the marathon’s route and have what used to be called a race.
What do we call it now? I’m not sure. The language tested positive the other day, but it’s a beautiful, beautiful language and it’s only in the hospital because there were some people here who wanted to be cautious. Very, very cautious.
The test’s fake anyway. The virus is a fake.
But with all that hospital equipment beeping, it’s hard to remember words. So never mind what we call it these days. It used to be a race. A very beautiful race.
Where were we?
All the other runners will do their miles wherever they happen to be–Cornwall, Australia, it doesn’t matter–and log their time onto an app, which will take their word for it and give them a medal.
Okay, the app won’t give them the medal. It has humans to do that for it.
This being Britain, a certain number of the participants will run in costume, which could be anything from a tutu to a telephone box. If you’ll click the link, you’ll see someone running in a 10 kilo a rhino costume. That’s 22 pounds, or to put it simply, a shitload of weight to go running in, especially since she has to hunch forward inside there and can’t see very well. And that’s just when she’s in training. On the day of the actual marathon, her husband will be on hand to steer her around trash barrels and gawping kids.
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Irrelevant photo: This flower is orange. You’re welcome.
A third of Britain is living with tighter-than-the-national Covid restrictions because of a localized rise in case numbers. And what really matters in all of this is who’s to blame.
Boris Johnson blames the public’s “fraying discipline.” It has nothing to do with the government having encouraged people over the summer to travel, eat out, drink out, get out with their wallets in hand, or with guidelines and laws so murky that Johnson got them wrong when he explained how simple they were. Or with its own advisors (and more recently an MP) breaking them. Or with a heroically useless test and trace system.
The mayor of one affected area, Middlesbrough, said the new measures were based on “factual inaccuracies and a monstrous and frightening lack of communication, and ignorance. . . . We do not accept these measures.”
Cases have managed to double in the majority of cities and towns under the tighter restrictions. I don’t have a start date for that–the restrictions started at different times in different areas–but it ended on September 20.
The best educated guess on why they haven’t been effective is that the rules are confusing and that the communities and their leaders haven’t been involved and don’t support them. Plus that when you try to talk about what’s wrong with the test and trace system the discussion quickly falls off the edge of the English language.
Okay. The expert whose opinion I’m paraphrasing, Chris Ham, said the test and trace system was “still not working well enough.” But I’m channeling what he really thinks. You know I am.
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Serious, labor-intensive contact tracing in two Indian states shows that just a few events were responsible for a disproportionate number of Covid infections. It also suggests that, contrary to what’s generally been thought, children transmit the virus quite efficiently, thanks. Every time I read a study about kids and transmission, it contradicts that last one, so let’s not rest too much weight on that frail bridge, just acknowledge that it’s all still preliminary.
Still, this is the biggest epidemiological study of the spread so far.
What they found is that 8% of the people they followed caused 60% of the infections. The things that seem to separate an event from a superspreader event are how close people are to someone who’s infected, how long they’re close, and how good the ventilation is.
Contact tracers followed 78 people who’d been on a bus or train with one lone infected person, sitting within three rows of them for more than six hours, and found that 80% of them had gotten the virus. In lower-risk environments–being in the same room but three feet away–only 1.6% got the virus.
Kids between the age of five and seventeen passed the virus on to 18% of the close contacts in their own age groups. That’s not exactly parallel information–how close, how long, how well or badly ventilated, or what percent of adults passed it on to close contacts –so it doesn’t tell us whether they’re passing the bug along as efficiently as their older, wiser, creakier relatives, but what the hell, it’s information. I thought I’d throw it at you.
The study also doesn’t answer the question of whether any biological factors separate your average infected person from your superspreader.
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Back at the start of the pandemic, the British government set up a loan program to help businesses survive. The British Business Bank warned that it was vulnerable to being scammed by people setting up fake businesses.
Actually, not just vulnerable to: at high risk of. The British Business Bank is state owned and was supposed to supervise the program, and it sounded the warning twice.
And surprise, surprise, exactly what they warned of has happened, although I don’t think anyone knows yet how often, or how much money the government’s on the hook for because of it. What I’ve seen so far is anecdotal–the ”someone stole my name to steal money from the government” sort of thing. But I thought you might need cheering up by now, so I wanted to mention it.
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A new study of Covid spread and singing is drawing from “faith communities” to find its participants. I’m putting that in quotes because on the one hand it manages to include every religion you can think of and several you can’t, so it’s useful, but on the other hand it sounds so prim and tippy-toed that I want to throw crockery at it. So I’ll use the phrase and disown it at the same time.
I just hate when people do that. Which is why I’m spending more time explaining it than I am talking about the study.
Other than its focus on religious groups, the study’s inclusive: It’ll involve people from a range of heights, sizes, sexes, ages, and ethnicities. Also with and without hairy faces in case any of that affects things. They’ll sing at different volumes, chant, or hum, using assorted face coverings, while lasers measure the aerosols they spray out.
These days I do all my singing from inside the large plastic wheelie bin that the county supplies for green waste recycling. With the lid down. As long as the green waste guys don’t come when I’m singing and the neighbors don’t get together to push me down the hill and into the ocean, it’s perfectly safe.
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It seems to be accepted at this point that Covid can catch a ride on the aerosols that we breathe out when we do all those noisy, communicative things that human evolution has given us, but it’s not clear to what extent aerosol-borne germs actually spread the disease.
What is known is that aerosols travel more than six feet–the magic distance that’s supposed to keep us all safe from other people’s germs. The six-foot recommendation was based on the larger particles–droplets–which fall to the ground relatively close to the breathing, singing, humming source. But aerosols can hang in the air for hours. They hold dances up there. They run marathons in rhinoceros costumes.
Okay, we don’t know what they do up there, or how dangerous it is to us. All we know for sure is that ventilation is a good thing. So are air purifying systems.
Mind you, I don’t know what qualifies as an air purifying system and I’m not in a hurry to take any non-expert’s word on it. I do know that open windows work. I also know that in a Minnesota January open windows aren’t as simple a solution as they are in June.
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An article in Journal of General Internal Medicine surveyed 28 experts in vaccinology (yes, there is such a thing) and on an average they thought a vaccine would be available to the general public (this would be in the US or Canada) at the earliest in June 2021 but more probably in September or October.
For people at the greatest risk, the soonest would be February but more probably March or April.
But as the great Yogi Berra may or may not have said, “It’s hard to make predictions. Especially about the future.”
Berra also may or may not have said, “I never said half the things I said,” which is why I’m being cautious about attributing that quote to him. Someone will, inevitably, let me know that someone else said it. And they’ll probably be right.
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Having Neanderthal genes, as 16% of Europeans, 50% of south Asians, and 0% of Africans do, can make a person three times more likely to need ventilation if they’re infected with Covid.
But Professor Mark Maslin added a however to that: “Lots of different populations are being severely affected, many of which do not have any Neanderthal genes. We must avoid simplifying the causes and impact of Covid-19. . . . Covid-19 is a complex disease, the severity of which has been linked to age, gender, ethnicity, obesity, health, virus load among other things.”
I only mentioned it because it’s so damn weird.
Why young adults don’t have a get-out-of-Covid-free card
As the pandemic lumbers onward, we’re hearing more about long Covid–the debilitating long-term effects that some people experience after the disease has passed. Here’s what I’ve been able to scrape together:
No one who catches the virus knows what card they’ll pull out of the Covid deck. Some people have no symptoms, some people get sick and recover, and some people die. As far as most discussions are concerned, that’s it. Cards distributed. Can we play something else, please?
Well, no, we can’t, because that middle group isn’t done drawing cards. Some of them recover fully, regardless of whether they had serious cases or mild ones, and some–even people who had mild cases–don’t go back to being the people they were before they got sick. And that includes young adults, the people we thought had a get-out-of-jail-free card for this disease.
The symptoms of long Covid range all over the place. They can include exhaustion, brain fog, memory problems, breathlessness, depression, hair loss, concentration problems, loss of the senses of taste and smell, joint pain, muscle aches, chest pain, chills, sweats, digestive issues, coughs. Trouble going upstairs and trouble walking to the end of the street (the road, the lane, the whatever) get mentioned a lot. Fatigue sounds like the most common symptom.
Some people slowly get better and move on. Some improve a bit and slip back a bit and improve again and slip back again. Some seem to be stuck at the bottom. And it goes on for months.
Does it get better? We don’t know yet.
Semi-relevant photo: This is called honesty. I can’t recommend it highly enough, especially to politicians in the middle of a pandemic. It’s out of season at the moment, but let’s not draw any overarching conclusions from that.
The Covid Symptom Study app–that’s not the official British test and trace app but it’s been downloaded by 3 million people and one cockatoo–says one person in twenty has long-term symptoms. Another app, this one in Scotland and Wales, comes up with one in ten having symptoms for longer than three weeks, some of them for months.
An article in the BMJ quotes Tim Spector, of the Covid Symptom Study, saying that if your version of Covid includes “a persistent cough, hoarse voice, headache, diarrhoea, skipping meals, and shortness of breath in the first week, you are two to three times more likely to get longer term symptoms.”
Long Covid seems to be about twice as common in women as in men.
Or in one Paris hospital, four times more common. The same hospital said the average age of the long-haulers they saw was forty.
I know. The numbers are all over the place. These are early reports, a lot of them involving a small number of cases. They’re not carefully designed studies. It’s too early for that.
Another study said a third of patients who had mild symptoms hadn’t gotten back to their pre-Covid health after two to three weeks. The older the patient, the more likely that was, but a quarter of the people between eighteen and thirty-four hadn’t bounced back.
Many long-haulers report that many doctors don’t take them or their symptoms seriously–especially if they’re women. And gee, no, we wouldn’t want to draw any overarching conclusions from that either.
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Meanwhile, back at the Journal of the American Medical Association, a study reports that older people are underrepresented in trials of both Covid vaccines and treatments.
Why’s that when they’re the most vulnerable to the disease? Because participation often depends on not having other diseases, or on having smart phones or internet access.
That causes a problem, because older patients may need higher or lower doses of a vaccine or a medicine. Get it wrong and a cure or vaccine can be either toxic or useless.
Dr. Sharon Inouye said, “To be sure, some exclusions are needed to protect the health and safety of older adults—such as poorly controlled comorbidities. However, many are not well-justified, and appear to be more for expediency or convenience of the trialists.”
Did you say something about overarching conclusions?
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Okay, how much do masks, handwashing, and keeping a distance from people limit the spread of Covid? Considerably, according to a study in Thailand.
Wearing a mask all the time lowers the risk by 77%. Wearing it only part of the time you’re with someone does fuck-all. So that business about putting on a mask at a restaurant when you head for the toilets, then taking it off so you can sit back down and shovel food into your face? Useless.
Keeping a meter away from people reduces infection by 85% and keeping contact down to fifteen minutes or less reduced the risk by 76%. Frequent handwashing? That reduced it by 66%. Add those all together and Covid will end up owing us. Or doesn’t it work that way?
If you’re wondering whether they’re talking about reducing the risk of passing on the disease or of getting it, I wondered the same thing.
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Researchers at Oxford University suggest that the best use of limited Covid testing resources would be to test people who are the most likely to pass on the disease–healthcare workers, transport workers, social care workers, delivery drivers, people who go to large gatherings, people in large cities–and to do it at regular intervals.
Random testing, they say, wastes resources.
Are we going to listen to them? Probably not. What do they know anyway?
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An anti-Covid nasal spray that’s been tested ferrets looks promising. It interacts with cells in the nasal cavity, waking up the immune system, which then kicks in and–
Okay, let’s not pretend I understand this. I’ll quote: It “kicks in like a defence shield which is broad-sprectrum and non-specific.” So presumably it slaughters anything it finds that looks suspicious. It’s odd how a moderately nonviolent person like my own bad-tempered self turns bloodthirsty when we’re discussing the immune system.
It’s too early to know if it’ll translate to humans. Or cause us to grow a glossy fur coat.
“The hope is that it will reduce the duration and severity of the symptoms and if you reduce the number of viral particles in the nose, the hope is that it would reduce transmission – although they haven’t done those studies yet.”
Hang onto that word hope. We need as much of it as we can get these days.
Stay well, people. I don’t have so many readers that I can afford to lose any.
Math, medicine, and research: It’s the news from Britain–and elsewhere
Martin Hairer won the $3 million 2021 Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics for explaining the math involved in stirring a cup of tea, which is also the math involved in several other things that don’t sound as silly. It’s complicated stuff–180 pages worth of complicated, involving regularity structures.
Never heard of them? Neither has anyone else. That’s what’s so impressive. They tame the randomness that throws disorder into equations involving the way forest fires grow, the way a drop of water spreads on a tissue, or the way that cup of tea you’re stirring–
Would you stop that stirring? You’re upsetting an otherwise ordered univer–
Damn. Now see what you’ve done.
Regularity structures may be the genuinely impressive element of his work, but if you want an impressive phrase to use when you’re pretending to explain this to someone who’ll understand it even less than you do and isn’t listening anyway, the phrase you want is stochastic analysis. Or better yet, stochastic partial differential equations. From those words on, everything you say will be nothing but a background hum to whatever’s going on inside your alleged listener’s own head.
If you want complicated math, though, you could try explaining why a bunch of mathematicians are giving out a 2021 prize in 2020.
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Irrelevant photo: Wind-carved rocks at the top of Rough Tor, which is pronounced Ruff Tor. No, don’t ask me.
If you’re British inflected instead of American inflected (yes, there’s an L in there: infLected), that’ll be maths, not math. I can only assume that the British are better with numbers than the Americans, since they wrestle with them in the plural and we only have one to fight with.
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The Breakthrough Prize is also awarded in the sciences, and Catherine Dulac won one for showing that the neural circuits that govern the behaviors involved in both male-specific and female-specific parenting are present in both sexes. I have no idea what the implications of that will turn out to be, but they should upset a few apple carts. I look forward to hearing more.
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As long as we’re on the subject of medicine and male/female differences, Rebecca Shanksy, a neurologist from Boston University (no, it’s not in Britain, but never mind) is calling for stricter requirements for medical research to include both female and male animals.
For decades, researchers have used both male animals and male human subjects on the grounds that the fluctuations of female hormones would–forgive me if I use complicated scientific language here–fuck up their results.
They did that even when they were studying conditions that mostly affected women. Because you know what women are like. Hormonal. Unstable. Unpredictable. Lots of un- words.
It turns out, according to Shanksy, that male rodents–the go-to subject of many experiments–are less stable in terms of both hormones and behavior than females.
Shanksy is, by way of full disclosure, a female and therefore likely to be biased and unstable. Unlike males researchers, who are entirely objective and don’t have hormones.
The result of the male bias in research subjects is that drugs are likely not to work as well on women as on men. Ambien, which did its trials using both male mice and male humans, turned out to be metabolized more slowly by women, and therefore (don’t ask me) more powerful in them.
Women tend to experience more side effects and overdoses for all drugs.
The U.S. and Canada now require female test subjects to be included (Britain doesn’t yet), but experiments are often done first on male subjects, with female subjects used later, treating the female subject as a deviation from the male standard. The article I read didn’t go into whether or how that biases the results, but I can see that if the first set of tests establish a standard, you could easily close off avenues that might be open if you worked differently.
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Were we talking about sexism? The Musee d’Orsay in Paris–a museum with walls full of nudes–wouldn’t let a woman in because an official decided her dress was cut too low.
And if that wasn’t bad enough, they followed up their decision by telling her, “Calm down, madam.”
So she did what any good citizen of the twenty-first century would do: She went online and called them out on their double standards and sexism. The museum has apologized, both by tweet and by telephone, but it’s not the first time the museum’s had a problem with women’s real-life flesh as opposed to the artistic depiction of it. It called the cops on a performance artist who posed nude next to a nude painting. She was in jail for two days before a judge threw out a charge of public indecency.
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An eighty-year-old hiker who’d been missing for three nights turned up not at his own funeral but at a press conference, held in a pub, where his family was about to appeal for help finding him.
Harry Harvey got separated from an organized walking group during a heavy hailstorm and spent three nights wild camping. He had camping gear with him but ran short on food. He described the area where he lost the group as desolate..
He eventually spotted a wildlife photographer, who called a rescue team and they brought him to the pub just in time for a dramatic reunion.
The quotes from his family make them sound a bit on the crabby side about it all.
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A research trial that put robots into care homes has been defended on the grounds that the robots aren’t intended to replace humans, only to help fill times when, because the care system’s overstretched, staff don’t have time to spend with residents.
Which is commonly known as replacing humans with robots, only the humans were taken out before the robots were put in and no one had any intention of filling the gap they left–not even with robots.
The robots have wheels and a name, which they all share–Pepper. Also arms and hands. With a bit of programming, they could hold basic conversations with the residents, learn what they’re interested in, play them music, teach them languages, and remind them to take their medicine.
This could go wrong in so many ways. In Japan and Singapore robots are more widely accepted and have been hacked to intercept phone calls or let the hacker use the robot’s camera and microphone. I don’t find any mention of medication reminders going wrong, but I doubt many of us suffer from the delusion that technology is flawless.
The two-week trial found that residents’ loneliness levels decreased–not hugely, but a bit.
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Britain’s home secretary, Priti Patel, called Extinction Rebellion “criminals who disrupt our free society and must be stopped.” Other cogs in the government chaos have talked about classifying it as an organized crime group, which takes a bit of mental mechanics, since XR is decentralized and I suspect you’d be hard put to find an overall organization.
The police, interestingly enough, see XR as nonviolent and committed to civil disobedience.
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We’ll end with some more science awards, the Ig Nobels. This year’s include an one for determining that many entomologists–those are the folks who study insects–are afraid of spiders. Which aren’t insects, so it seems fair. Another went to a study that tried to spot narcissists by the shape of their eyebrows. A third went to a study that looked for a correlation between a nation’s income inequality and the prevalence of mouth-to-mouth kissing.
Oh, no you won’t: A quick history of the British panto
Nothing except the curry is as British as the panto.
I’ve made that claim about a lot of things, and it’s true of every last one of them. And I didn’t even make up the comparison, so lots of people have made the claim about lots of things.
Nothing is as unoriginal as comparing an British / English whatever to a curry.
But if I’ve destroyed my own opening thoroughly enough, let’s move on and talk about the panto. Having grown up in the US, I thought pantomime meant silent acting. You know: Marcel Marceau. That kind of thing. We call it mime for short.
But for the British–well, they grabbed the opposite end of the word, we hung onto ours and between us we broke the thing. So forget mime. What they do is panto, and it’s full of words.
How British is it? Exactly as British as the curry: In other words, it came from someplace else–in the case of the panto, Italy and from there, France–and embedded itself deeply in British culture.
Irrelevant photo: No fall–or autumn, if I’m pretending to be British–is complete without a photo of gorse and heather. They’re everywhere. They’re behind you, probably.
It started as sixteenth-century Italian Commedia dell’arte, which was traveling street theater, although the better troupes weren’t above performing in a palace if one wandered past. The shows involved music, dance, dialogue, and a heavy dose of mayhem.
Italy wasn’t a united country at this point, and it had many very different dialects. So how did they handle dialogue when the troupes traveled? According to one source, they made a virtue of the differences. One character spoke Spanish (no, that’s not Italian or a dialect, but somehow it’s on the list). One spoke Bolognese. One spoke gibberish. And so on. What pulled it all together was the physical communication–clowning, acrobatics, dance, music. One character, Arlecchino (are-lay-KEY-no–he’s the origin of our word harlequin), had two sticks that were tied together so they’d make a loud noise and he whacked everything available with them, including the scenery and the other characters. And that, children, is the origin of our word slapstick.
The women’s roles were played by women, and since the European tradition had banned women from the stage, this was radical.
The sets were basic–they had to travel–and many elements were predictable, including the characters, which were fixed types, recognizable from play to play, from troupe to troupe. A lot of them were played in masks. (The lovers–because what’s a play without lovers?–weren’t.) So forget deep characterization. What mattered were the tumbles, the slapstick, the chases, and the jokes, which were also recognizable from play to play.
All of that, though, was scaffolding for the improvisation. The actors played off each other and the audience, so the play would never be quite the same twice.
From Italy, the form moved to France, and from France it moved to England, and from the sixteenth century time moved to the seventeenth. In England, Commedia dell’arte collided with masques, which had started in the 14th century as musical, mimed, or spoken dramas put on in grand houses. By the seventeenth century–or so says one source–they were basically an excuse for a theme party.
Commedia d’etc. may also have had a small collision with a medieval (or Tudor, depending on who you want to believe) Christmas tradition, the Feast of Fools, which was run by the Lord of Misrule, because before too many centuries had passed the panto became as tightly connected to Christmas as brussels sprouts (don’t ask–it won’t get us anywhere).
In the eighteenth century, the word pantomime took hold and the form began gobbling up existing stories–Aladdin, Robinson Crusoe, Cinderella, you name it.
By the Victorian era, the principal boy’s role was played by a woman. In the Victorian era, that would’ve been pretty racy stuff, involving ankles and legs and all sorts of body parts no one knew women had. The dame was enthusiastically overplayed by a man. If you were inclined to take anything too seriously, that would knock the idea out of your head.
Then they added some dancers and an audience, which got to yell out some stock phrases: He’s behind you. Oh, no you won’t.
It’s an odd thing, but after you repeat those a few dozen times, they begin to be funny. In fact, they’ve cut loose from the panto and become free-floating punchlines in real life.
In some stories, they got to add a pantomime horse–two people in a horse costume. Hold onto that thought.
These days–or before the pandemic, anyway–pantos were performed in grand theaters with professional or semi-professional actors and in village halls with hangdog ten-year-olds who delivered their lines as if they’d been strong-armed into taking part because they had been.
Many theaters relied on pantos for a heavy portion of their year’s income. The could reliably fill the seats.
By the time a panto ends, good has conquered evil and the lovers have been united. And where I live, until there’s been a raffle. You don’t get to leave a village event until you buy a ticket, and if you win something you want look happy with your prize, no matter how odd it is.
Why am I writing about this in September? In part because the British government’s running like a badly written panto:
“We will get control of the corona virus.”
“Oh, no you won’t.”
“Oh, yes we will.”
“Oh, not unless you get your act together you won’t.”
But also because a bit of the panto has broken loose, abandoned the Christmas season, and become the panto horse race: pairs of people in horse costumes in a race. Ask Lord Google about it and he’ll tell you they take place (at the very least) in Colchester and in Catterick. Here’s one that was won by a cow.
The London panto horse race seems to be the same as the Greenwich one, and it goes from pub to pub, stopping at each one. By the end, the horses are looking a little the worse for wear. Or possibly for beer. The front end of one horse was having a drinking problem that had to do with the length of a horse’s muzzle and the size of a pint glass of beer.
For the best of the videos, I couldn’t find anything outside of Twitter or Facebook, but if you enjoy pictures of people falling over, horses coming apart, and scenery being destroyed, it’s very funny.
Go on, click the links. You know you want to.
Oh, yes you do.
Flags and rust: It’s the pandemic update from Britain
The government tells us we have a great system of Covid testing. World beating. So let’s check in on it. Again.
If you live someplace that’s not a hotspot and want a test, you’ll be chasing all over the country to get one. Take, as a purely random example, me. The website where you register for a test wanted me to drive 86 point something miles to I’ve forgotten where. And back, although that wasn’t their problem but mine. It didn’t sound like a great idea, so I followed a link that took me to a page that promised I’d have a test in the mail the next day.
The next day came and went, along with many of its friends, who followed in a line, as days will. I still haven’t had a test in the mail and have stopped expecting one. Fortunately, I’m fine. I had a sore throat–not the most Covid common symptom but not an impossible one–and a fit of paranoia collided with a sense of civic responsibility. It’s possible that I got downgraded because I had the wrong symptom. It’s also possible that they dumped everyone into electronic limbo. I have no way to know.
What I do know is that the priority is being given to high-risk areas. That makes a kind of sense, but it also leaves clusters to build up, unspotted, in new areas. It also means the people allegedly in charge of the country have once again let us run short of tests–the number of people requesting them has gone up–leading them to set up a kind of triage-by-determination system. If you’re willing to drive 65 point something miles, you can have your test. If you’re too sick to do it, you can’t.
You can also (or so the radio tells me–and yes, it was on at the time) log back into the website later and you might be offered a perfectly sane location for a test. Or you might not. Nothing is guaranteed.
In calculating the distances between the person using the website and the nearest testing center, they seem to have assumed that they’re dealing with crows rather than drivers. According to a BBC calculation, a 109-mile trip would’ve involved 206 miles of driving. I suspect mine would’ve as well, because I think they wanted to send me to Wales, and I’m not much of a swimmer.
This is happening just as the schools reopen. So will there be testing to make sure the kids don’t all infect each other and bring the bug home? Of course not. It’s not a priority.
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The Notting Hill Carnival–usually the largest street party in Europe–went online this year. It’s director, Matthew Phillip, said, “For more than 50 years, carnival has been a statement that black lives matter. That’s normal practice for us, it’s not something that we’re just jumping on now because of the current global climate and what’s going on. Carnival has been making these statements for 50 years.”
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The Edinburgh festivals–that includes the International Festival, the Fringe, and the Book Festival–also went online. This was the first time they’d been canceled since 1947, and that was done–touchingly–in honor of my birth, even if they were a few months late.
As far as I can figure out, its offerings ended in August, but if you want to mess around and see if I’m wrong (it happens), start here.
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In another heartwarming sign of unity among the four nations that make up the United Kingdom, England and Northern Ireland are telling travelers from Greece and Portugal that they don’t have to quarantine after they arrive in Britain but Scotland and Wales are (sort of) telling them that they do.
The sort of is because it’s not that simple. It involves parts of Greece, mainland Portugal, and–oh–Gibraltar. Have we mentioned Gibraltar? But that’s only for Wales. Scotland’s list is a little different. It’s complicated.
Complicated enough that a BBC TV show used a graphic with four flags to show who had to do what if they were landing where–or going there after they landed. Only instead of Northern Ireland’s flag, they substituted the Republic of Ireland’s. It’s easy to do. Northern Ireland doesn’t have a flag. All that symbolism and passion that people pour into their flags is too explosive for a divided nation and they’ve (probably wisely) decided to live without one. They’re stuck with the Union Jack.
The BBC made the appropriate straight-faced apology, but I can’t help thinking that someone’s giggling uncontrollably behind a closed door somewhere.
Or maybe normal people don’t react to embarrassing mistakes that way.
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Since schools have opened, this might be a good time to announce that vomiting and diarrhea may be key signs of Covid-19 in kids.
I almost reported that as “voting and diarrhoea.” It was a typo, but they might do better than we adults have lately.
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Tony Abbott, Australia’s former prime minister, is being considered for the position of UK trade envoy. He’s a man of great compassion, having argued that since Covid meant it cost the Australian government up to $200,000 for an extra year in an elderly person’s life, families should be able to let their eldery relatives die of the virus the natural (not to mention cheaper) way if they want to.
I’m happy to report that Mr. Abbott is not one of my relatives.
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After that, we need something that isn’t about the pandemic: The earth is making the moon rust.
The problem with that is that rust only happens in the presence of oxygen, and the moon doesn’t have an atmosphere. It spent it all when it was a kid, buying candy and sugary drinks.
Ah, but it does have trace amounts of oxygen hidden away, and it’s all due to Earth’s magnetic field. Oxygen molecules, it turns out, can hitch a 385,000 kilometers ride on the magnetic field and land on the moon, needing a shower and a change of clothes but otherwise none the worse for their travels.
It’s also possible, although less fun, that the oxygen got there when the moon and the Earth were closer together. Or that it’s released when dust particles hit the ice hidden under lunar craters.
How does dust hit something hidden under a crater? Dunno. There’s a third theory, but I understood even less of that. It has to do with hydrogen and solar winds. You’re on your own. I really should stick to topics I understand, but I couldn’t resist the idea of the moon rusting.
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And finally for the heartening spectacle of someone who understands social media less than I do: A Scottish member of parliament, Annie Wells, has two Twitter accounts. One is her own and the other is Women2Win Scotland (“Leading the campaign to elect more Conservative women to Parliament”).
Using her own account, she tweeted something snotty about a political opponent. Then, thinking she’d changed accounts, she tweeted, “Spot on@AnniewellsMSP,” adding a thumbs up, a Union flag, and a Saltire to make the celebration complete.
Only she hadn’t switched accounts. She was praising herself from her own account. She deleted it, tweeted it from her other account, and hoped no one had noticed.
They had. Of course they had. They always do.
The Saltire, in case I lost you back there a ways, is Scotland’s flag. It’s not to be confused with Ireland’s. Or Northern Irelands. Or, most especially, England’s. Or Britain’s. You probably won’t confuse it with the Welsh flag, because that has a dragon.
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WP in its wisdom dumped me into its glorious new editing experience–which of course I hate. Anyone know how to resize photos or add captions?
Notes from the U.K. 