Jackie Weaver has authority everywhere

Posted on by
20

Let’s start with a recap: In December, Jackie Weaver was brought in to chair an obscure local government meeting. At the time, she was as obscure as the meeting. 

Like local government meetings everywhere, this one should’ve sent the most over-caffeinated participant into a peaceful sleep, but this one had a couple of difficult participants and they tried to take over the meeting. It’s not irrelevant that they were and are male and Weaver was and is female. You’ve been around long enough to know how that works.

“Jackie Weaver, you have no authority here,” one huffed at her. 

“Read the standing orders,” another one boomed. “Read them and understand them.”

She sent them into Zoom limbo, one after another.

Then the whole thing went viral and she became a hero. 

More than 80 members of the public joined the next local government’s meeting, laughing and calling out their favorite lines from the Jackie Weaver meeting. Some of them dressed for the occasion, one in a pith helmet, one in something vaguely like a hard hat, and one wearing some sort of flat, handmade mask. 

Completely irrelevant photo: cyclamen

The reason I’m recapping all that is that she’s now the subject of two songs. The first one uses lines from the meeting itself, delivered in perfect a Colonel Blimp* voice. The second is a tribute by Andrew Lloyd Webber and says Weaver’s “the role model we all strive to be. She doesn’t want a medal, just a nice cup of tea.”

What could be more British?

You can also buy Jackie Weaver mugs, shirts, Mother’s Day cards, stickers, and posters, as well as a spiral-bound notebook that says, “And God said unto Moses, ‘Jackie Weaver has authority here.’ “

It’s not like there’s a hell of a lot of justice in this world, so it’s delicious when some is delivered, and especially when it take the form of humor.

* Colonel Blimp was a puffed-up British cartoon character from the 1930s and ‘40s, known for idiotic statements, including this gem: “Gad, Sir! Lord Bunk is right. The government is marching over the edge of an abyss, and the nation must march solidly behind them.”

When England reluctantly adopted the fork

Posted on by
73

Although you can still find Britons who measure other people’s intelligence, level of civilization, and general acceptability by whether they use a fork and knife in the approved manner (and of course there’s only one), the fork first arrived in Britain to the sound of mockery and jeering. 

Unlike the knife and the spoon, the fork doesn’t seem to be one of those things early humans felt a strong urge to invent. 

According to the Smithsonian website, prehistoric humans made spoons out of shells or wood depending what was on hand. 

Forks, though? A few early ones have been found, but the design says they weren’t meant to eat with. They had two or three straight tines, and they were meant to hold something down while you cut it, or maybe work something reluctant out of its shell.

Irrelevant photo: a morning view of the fields.

 

 

The fork dawdles on its way to England

The fork came to Britain by way of Europe, and since this was before the European Union and also before either social media and influencers, it took its own sweet time. 

It got to Europe in the eleventh century by way of a couple of Byzantine princesses who married 1) a Venetian doge and 2) a Holy Roman Emperor. Both sent their new subjects (and probably their husbands) into shock by bringing forks with them and then using them to carry food to their mouths. 

What was so horrifying about using a fork?

Well, “God in his wisdom has provided man with natural forks—his fingers,” according to one of the Venetians.  

I just love the religious habit of knowing what god wants. It holds up so well over time. 

The princess who married the doge died of the plague a few years later and Saint Peter Damian announced that it was god’s punishment for her vanity. 

By the fourteenth century, though, forks were common among merchants. 

Why merchants? 

Why not merchants? It’s beside the point, so we’ll just duck left and avoid that rabbit hole. And while we’re at it, we’ll hop over to England and into the sixteenth century. By then the fork had paddled across the Channel and if you wanted to make fun of someone for being pretentious, all you had to do was associate them with the fork. In Scoff, her book on food and class in Britain, Pen Vogler cites a couple of plays that use them that way.

How did decent people eat?

With their fingers, of course. With their bread. With a knife. Presumably with a spoon, although we won’t find a lot of documentation of spoons early on in English history. The first one mentioned is in Edward I’s wardrobe accounts in 1259. But whether they made it into the written record or not, food that’s cooked needs to be stirred. And food that’s runny doesn’t take well to being eaten with a knife, or even the fingers, although it gets along well enough with bread. 

The poor, Vogler reminds us, would mostly have eaten bread and pottage (a stew made mostly of grain, beans, and vegetables, in whatever combination was available). Fingers and (maybe) a spoon would’ve been plenty. 

The aristocracy would’ve had a servant to pour water over their hands before they ate and they’d have cut and speared their food with a knife and used a combination of bread and fingers for anything that couldn’t be speared and didn’t need to be cut. So they were fussier about it, but they were still eating with their fingers.

Soups and stews were served in communal bowls, which everyone in reach could dip into. Or so says the Royal Museums Greenwich website. (The link’s above). They wiped their hands on the tablecloths, which were plain linen but damned expensive because everything was handmade, remember. How anyone got the tablecloths clean is beyond me.

Forks were strictly for carving, and even that may have caught on slowly. In 1673, Hannah Woolley felt she needed to encourage gentlewomen to carve and serve meat with a fork. 

“It will appear very comely and decent,” she wrote, to use a fork instead of holding the mean with two fingers and the thumb of the left hand. 

And I thought my manners were a little rough. 

 

The triumph of the fork

By the time of the Restoration (that’s 1660 to 1666; thank you, Lord G.), matching forks, knives, and spoons were in use among the upper class. This was fancy stuff and it was all part of a rejection of Puritan plainness. Many sets came with a sheath–a sort of travel case–so if you were invited to a fancy dinner you could bring your own. Even in upper class circles, you couldn’t count on your hosts having enough silverware for a party. 

The forks involved were still two-tine type. A third tine was added in the eighteenth century, and by this time silverware was being mass produced (in Sheffield, in case you’re interested). If you were trying to claw your way into the upper classes, you’d need a whole set of the stuff. But you’d want to show that you’d gotten the right silverware, so the style was to lay it face down and show off the silver hallmark. 

When it wasn’t in use, you’d keep it in a fancy wooden box, sort of like dueling pistols. 

Silverware defined the aristocratic life, and starting in the 1820s the kind of novel that gave readers a glimpse of that world was called the silver fork novel.

By Victorian times, cutlery had moved down the social scale, so the upper classes had to complicate their dinner tables to keep from being confused with their underlings. You needed one kind of fork for oysters, another for lobster, another for snails, for fish, for pastry, for dessert (pastry isn’t dessert? Don’t ask me; I’m a barbarian), for berries, for serving bread. And god help the diner (or worse, the hostess) who didn’t know which to use for what. Toss them into the outer darkness.

By now, damn everything had to be eaten with a fork. If you were served jellied something that wobbled and demonstrated a desire to return to a liquid form? Tough. You ate it with a fork. A banana? You could use your knife to help slice it, but you had to eat it with a fork. 

Crystallized cherries? You weren’t supposed to use a knife on them, only a fork. I’m not sure what you were supposed to do with the pits. Swallow them? Definitely not spit them at the person sitting across the table, although it might’ve broken the tension.

What’s a crystallized cherry? No idea. It involves sugar. And a cherry. 

Now can we let’s leave the upper class struggling unhappily with their crystalized cherries and their forks and see what’s happened to the folks who we last saw eating pottage with their fingers and their bread–and possibly their spoons?

Sure we can. We make our own rules here. Spit the cherry pits if you want to. Just clean them up before you leave.

In 1906, free school meals were offered to the poorest students, although only where the local government saw fit. You know how it is: You feed them once and they only want to eat the next day, so may a  local government didn’t see the point. (Universal education until the age of ten had been introduced in 1880, and a lot of people didn’t see the point of that either.)

With the introduction of free school meals, teachers discovered that their students weren’t used to using a knife and fork or to eating at a table. 

I can’t help thinking that they were used to the idea that parents couldn’t afford to feed their kids. But not to teach them to eat properly? Now that was serious.

 

Class and the fork

In the 1920s,  stainless steel made cutlery affordable enough for the mass market. So ow the upper class needed a new way to keep themselves from being mistaken from the kind of people who’d spit cherry pits. The proper way to use the knife and fork, if you’re hanging around the upper classes–or the well-behaved middle classes–is to hold your fork upside down. No, that doesn’t mean you hold onto the tines and eat with the handle. You hold the handle, but instead of letting the hollow face upward, as logic dictates, you hold it so the hump faces up and all the food you can’t spear slides off. 

Why? So the upper classes can keep their tables free from cherry-pit spitters. It’s a kind of secret handshake, only everyone knows it. It’s just that some of us can’t be bothered using it. Or can’t bring ourselves to do it. Or can’t remember it for the length of a meal.

The people this matters to take it painfully seriously, though. Hold your fork the logical way and you’re (you’ll need to read this next phrase in a disapproving voice) scooping your food. Or even worse, shoveling it. You might get mistaken for someone who eats because they’re hungry.

Vogler quotes Debrett’s–the ultimate British guide to class snobbery–on this: “It may be necessary to use mashed potato to make peas stick to the fork but it is incorrect to turn the fork over and scoop.”

Yes, they’re serious.

Cold combustion as a way to kill Covid

Posted on by
40

A German project called CoClean-up (which sounds English to me, but what do I know?) has developed an air filtration system that doesn’t capture the Covid virus but destroys it, meaning that no one has to change air filters or figure out what to do with dirty filters once they’re removed.  All the process leaves behind is CO2 and hydrogen, neither of which is toxic.

The system uses cold combustion, and I never heard of it either. Air’s fed through a saline solution (basically, salt water of one sort or another). That filters out any organic particles, which includes Covid. Two electrodes run zap the saline solution. Tiny amounts of CO2 forms around one electrode and hydrogen at the other. They disperse into the room, along with the cleaned air. 

It’s still being tested, and a demonstrator model should be introduced in April. If all goes well, they expect to launch the thing commercially in another eighteen months.

Irrelevant photo: crocuses

 

A follow-up on vaccines and transmission

After falling for just long enough to tempt a person into optimism, worldwide Covid infection rates are rising again. The only exception at the moment is Africa. 

So let’s grab what good news we can: A study following vaccinated and unvaccinated health care workers reports that the Pfizer vaccine sharply reduced the number of asymptomatic Covid cases. That means that it also reduced the chances that a vaccinated person would transmit the virus: If you’re not carrying the disease, you don’t get to pass it on. Look it up in the handbook. Those are the rules. You can take it up with the management if you don’t like them.

From here on, I warn you, a lot of numbers have pushed their way in. It’s not my fault. They got in the door before I could slam it.

Ready?

In the unvaccinated group, 0.8% of the group tested positive for Covid but had no symptoms. Compare that to 0.37% in the group that had been vaccinated less than 12 days before. 

Why 12 days? That’s the number of days after vaccination when the immune system’s believed to wake up and get to work. That’s in the handbook too. It’s also the number of days in a traditional Christmas–the kind almost no one in English-speaking countries celebrates anymore. And the number of months in the calendar.

More than 12 days after vaccination, 0.2% tested positive. 

That’s not sterilizing immunity, but it does give the virus fewer chances to migrate from person to person–and with that, fewer chances to mutate. Take a deep breath. We’re making a bit of progress here. We still need masks. We still need distance. We don’t have reports on how the other vaccines are doing as far as transmission goes, and anyone who’s lucky enough to have been vaccinated needs to remember that not everyone has been and they could still pass it on. But we’re making a bit of progress.

 

Variants

A variant found in the Brazilian city of Manaus–the P.1 variant–has infected people who had recovered from an earlier strain of Covid. Out of a hundred people who recovered from an earlier strain, the estimate is that somewhere between 25 and 61 people could be reinfected. That’s a hell of a range, so we’re still dealing with rough estimates, but it’s sobering all the same, and a reminder to anyone who still believes that herd immunity will save our asses that herd immunity is not our mother and does not love us. If the big kids on the block pick on us, it will not come swooping down and send them home crying.

It’s also a reminder that until everyone is safe, no one is safe. And did I happen to mention that just ten countries have gotten three-quarters of the 191 million Covid vaccinations that have been delivered to date?)

The new variant may also weaken the effect of the vaccine being used in Brazil–one of the Chinese ones. The vaccine will still prevent severe Covid, and masks and distancing will still reduce transmission, so it’s not time to roll over and play dead, but the variant is spreading in Brazil and has popped up in other countries–24 of them at last count.  

*

With talk of Covid variants spreading at roughly the same rate as Covid itself, the question of what to call them has gotten serious. Someone who speaks medicalese will have no problem remembering the difference between B.1.351 and VOC 202012/02, but the rest of us tend to glaze over when we hear the official names. We fall back on place names: The British variant (a.k.a the Kent variant). The South African variant. The Brazilian variant, only, oops, that’s now two variants. 

Why’s that a problem? First, because in a place as big as Brazil with as many cases as it has is almost bound to come up with more than one variant if it’s given enough time. Second, because humans are a difficult species and when a place is associated with a scary variant they tend to blame the place, along with the people who come from there. And third, because the places where the variants were found aren’t necessarily the places where the variants emerged. They just happen to be the places where they were first noticed.

So the World Health Organization has put together a committee to come up with a more sensible naming system. Not for every variant, only for the worrying ones. The names have to be easy to pronounce and easy to remember, and they have to avoid badmouthing the regions where the variants were found.  

One possibility is to name them in the order they were identified, giving us V1, V2, and so on. It’s not as much fun as naming storms, but it does avoid the problem of keeping an even balance of genders and languages.

 

Kids, Covid, Catholics, and Dolly Parton

For perfectly sensible reasons, researchers set out to discover what kids know about Covid, along with what they want to know and how they feel. They had some good questions. They knew some perfectly sensible things. We’ll ignore all of that to focus on one memorable quote.

“It is a stupid virus.”  

*

The Catholic archdiocese of New Orleans told its parishioners to avoid the Johnson & Johnson vaccine because it was developed using a “morally compromised” cell line that originated from aborted fetuses. The Moderna and Pfizer vaccines are okay, even though some lab testing involved “abortion-derived cell lines.”

What’s the difference? Beats me. 

Pope Francis has already said it’s “morally acceptable” to get any of the vaccines. So we‘ve finally found someone who really is more Catholic than the Pope.

*

Dolly Parton got vaccinated and sang–to the tune of “Jolene”–“Vaccine, vaccine, vaccine, vaccine, / I’m begging of you, please don’t hesitate. / Vaccine, vaccine, vaccine, vaccine, / because once you’re dead, then that’s a bit too late.”

To people who are hesitating, she said, “I just want to say to all of you cowards out there – don’t be such a chicken squat. Get out there and get your shot.” Click on the link and you can hear her. 

Last year, she donated $1 million to help fund research on the Moderna vaccine. 

The search for normalcy: can a vaccine block Covid transmission?

Posted on by
37

With the number of vaccinated people in Britain growing, let’s talk about whether those of us who’ve had that magic needle stuck in our arms still need to be careful, and if so, who we’re being careful of. 

Answer number one is yes, damn it all, and answer number two is other people. Which you probably already know, so let’s take half a step to the side and talk about why.

The primary job of a vaccine is to keep people from getting sick, and the Covid vaccines do a better job than most. But very few vaccines get the infecting agent out of people’s systems completely. What they do is keep the infection at a level the body can deal with it. 

The rare vaccines that completely block an infection give us sterilizing immunity. The measles vaccine does that, and there may be others but I haven’t found a list and I’ve started to suspect that’s because the measles vaccine is the only one that would be on it. So no one–or no one who understood the situation–really expected sterilizing immunity from the Covid vaccines.

Irrelevant photo: hellebore.

What makes sterilizing immunity so hard to achieve? For Covid, the vaccine goes into the muscle but the virus goes into all those snotty places where our bodies create mucus. To expect sterilizing immunity from that combination is asking a lot. That’s not my interpretation. You don’t want my interpretation on this. I stole it from an article by someone who knew what they were talking about, but it does make an intuitive kind of sense. 

No, I don’t trust intuitive kind of sense any more than I trust my interpretation on this kind of thing. It can lead us so far into the dense fog.

An early trial involving rhesus macaques and the AstraZeneca vaccine suggested that sterilizing immunity was possible, but they were using a nasal spray. Why the nasal spray was abandoned I don’t know, but researchers are once again (or maybe that’s still) playing with the possibilities of nasal sprays. As usual, there’s no guarantee that they’ll work, but if they do they may prevent transmission. 

Or they may not. If you don’t hear about them again, they didn’t.

The current theory is that the vaccines we’re using can slow transmission but can’t stop it completely. They lower the amount of virus an infected person is carrying around, and that lowers the amount of virus the infected person spews out in the course of a day. 

But that’s a theory. Why don’t we know that for sure? 

Because the vaccine trials were set up to look for two things: bad reactions to the vaccine and symptomatic Covid cases. They didn’t look for asymptomatic infections. Finding asymptomatic infections would’ve meant testing tens of thousands of participants every time they walked through a doorway or found lint in their pockets. .

Some of the trials that are still running do test occasionally, and they’ll pick up some asymptomatic infections, and with them some useful information. The Johnson & Johnson trial suggests that the vaccine’s causing a significant drop in transmission. That’s still only a suggestion, though, not rock solid proof. It tells us whether the virus is present in people’s noses but not how infectious it is. For all we know, the virus could be sitting in there with its feet up, drinking tea, and having no plans at all for world conquest. 

The only way to be sure about transmissibility is through a challenge trial–one of those things where you deliberately infect people, or at least risk infecting them. With a disease that kills people and that we don’t have reliable treatments for, that’s hard to justify.

 

Challenge trials

Did I just make it sound like challenge trials have been ruled out? They haven’t been.

Challenge trials–and I’m quoting someone or other here, although I’ve lost track of who it is–are an ethical minefield and only justifiable if the benefits absolutely outweigh the risks. But Britain’s approved a Covid challenge trial involving 90 young, healthy volunteers.

The point of the trial is to figure out the smallest amount of virus needed to cause an infection. That–for reasons that haven’t filtered down to me (and yes, my feelings are hurt, but I’m sure I’ll get over it eventually)–will help doctors understand Covid better and also boost vaccine and treatment research. 

But again, with new variants imitating popcorn kernels in a hot kettle, any information we get from the trial is likely to be out of date by the time it’s published. Or even gathered. 

Add to that the knowledge that young, healthy people aren’t guaranteed to come through a bout of Covid untouched and you do have to wonder what the point here is. They can come away with long-term lung damage. They can be landed with lifelong problems that range from the annoying to the crippling. I won’t reprint the full menu of long Covid symptoms. Let’s just say that it’s one scary fucking menu, that not a lot is known about long Covid yet, and that you absolutely don’t want it. If people are going to roll those dice, it should be for something worthwhile.

 

Have I failed in my duty to complain about the government?

I get tired of complaining about Britain’s current government–its incompetence, its corruption, its sheer inexcusable existence, and I skip a lot of things that really are worth covering because I don’t want to do the blog equivalent of pounding a single note on the piano with a hammer. 

But with England’s schools set to reopen next week, it’s time to take a peek at the government’s plan to help kids catch up with lost schooling. The most disadvantaged kids, who’ve on average fallen behind more affluent kids during lockdown, will get tutored in small groups. 

Glorious. 

Only to get their hands on the funding, schools have to use an organization on the approved list of the “tuition partners.” 

Tuition partners? Yes, and someone got paid to come up with that phrase. It’s so bad that I went ahead and splurged on a set of quotation marks to keep it from leaking out into the rest of the post. 

Most of our friendly tuition partners are for-profit companies. One will charge £84 an hour to teach a group of three kids. And its pay for teachers–

Is it okay if we’ll call them teachers, not tuition partner self-employed contractors? 

Its pay scale starts at £15 an hour. I’m not sure what the top rate is, but you could take what the company collects for one hour’s tutoring and pay five starting-rate teachers (or tuition partner self-employed contractors if you insist) and still have enough left over for ice cream.

Another company is charging £72 an hour and paying a teacher with 16 years’ experience £31 an hour–43% of what the company’s getting paid. I don’t know what the starting rate is.

I seem to remember that the argument for privatizing absolutely everything was that private companies would be more efficient than government and save the taxpayer money. Tell me I’m not the only person who remembers that.

*

As long as  I’m grousing about the general nastiness of the government we happen to have on hand, I just read that after announcing that it would extend the eviction ban–that thing that keeps tenants who’ve fallen behind on their rent because of the pandemic in their homes–they wrote in a big honkin’ loophole so that the ban doesn’t cover you if you’ve fallen more than six months behind.

Did they notice that there’s a difference between six months and a year-long pandemic? Probably. These are the numbers people.  

So, fanfare about no one getting evicted because of Covid, and people will get evicted because of Covid anyway.

In January, 750,000 families were behind on their housing payments (that category sounds like a combination of mortgage payments and rent), and pandemic rent debts added up £375 million. 

The National Residential Landlords Association wants the government to give tenants interest-free loans, which oddly enough will help the landlords but tenants who’ve been out of work for the past year to figure out how they’ll repay the loan.

Some sort of thought does need to be given to the debt that’s piling up on all sides. Maybe what we need is an approved list of companies that will help tenants file loan applications. The companies can take 57% of the money in payment for their services and the tenants can pay back 100%. 

We can call them loan application partners. And everyone will be happy.

How do we unlock a lockdown?

Posted on by
44

Britain’s poking its nose out of lockdown and looking around to see if it’s safe for the rest of the body politic to follow. A lot of people have been vaccinated–or half vaccinated, which will, we hope, hold us for the time being. The number of new Covid infections is dropping. The number of deaths is dropping. The daffodils are blooming.

Daffodils have no antiviral properties, but they do make people feel good.

So what are the prospects of getting out of this mess without setting off a new spike?

 

Daffodils. Take three and call me in the morning–or is that joke so dated that you have to be over 70 to get it?

Peeking out of lockdown

Britain’s four component nations will chart their own routes out of lockdown and each will look contemptuously at the choices the other three made, but we’ll only follow England’s here, because that’s complicated enough, thanks. 

Stage one is reopening the schools, which will open on March 8, and initially all students from secondary level on up were supposed to return at once, bright-eyed and with a negative Covid test in hand.

How were they supposed to get that negative test result? We’ll skip the details, but headteachers said there wouldn’t be time–it would take a good three weeks to get everyone tested. Teachers unions and school governors had been calling for a phased return for a good long while, although the government was ignoring them.

Hell, what do they know?

Then two days after announcing the plan, the government did a U-turn. Of course secondary schools can bring the kids back in stages. 

You’d think a government would be embarrassed to be this visibly disorganized, but if it bothers them they hide it well. And the outrage machine that makes up a large segment of the British media doesn’t seem to be bothered by it.

Once they’re back in school, older kids will take a continuing series of tests–the quick kind called lateral flow tests, which are problematic. They miss a lot of cases in the best of circumstances and miss more when done by non-experts. The kids will have a few tests at school and after that they’ll take them home to do themselves. 

These are school kids, remember. They’re the definition of non-experts. So don’t expect too much from the results here.

The government’s Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Modelling says the scientific consensus is that opening the schools this way will drive up the R number–the number of people that each infected person goes on to infect–by anywhere between 10% and 50%. 

Have I mentioned that teachers haven’t been a priority category in the drive to vaccinate the country? So they’re being asked to take a deep breath, walk into class, and roll the Covid dice. Masks are at least recommended for older kids in class, not just in the hallways, but that’s recommended, not required. 

Elementary school kids? Nope, they haven’t even gone that far. 

And in case the message on masks sounds too coherent, though, the school standards minister (who knew we had one?) went on TV to say that masks and testing weren’t compulsory. Parents could decide whether their kids would use either. 

“I despair,” the head of one school was quoted as saying.

Let’s not go through the unlocking stage by stage. What matters is that before the country moves from one stage to the next, the situation will be evaluated. If it looks good, we move on. If not, we wait. So far so good, but what they’ll be measuring isn’t the number of cases but the number of deaths, the number of hospital admissions, the number of people vaccinated, the variant situation. So if a gazillion twelve-year-olds all test positive, it’s okay as long as deaths and hospitalizations don’t get out of control.

Are you getting a sense of why this makes my skin itch? People who test positive are the early warnings of a new spike, but the assumption seems to be that cases can be contained as long as they’re not hospitalized or dying. That kids won’t pass it to families. That teachers won’t be hospitalized and won’t pass it to partners and parents. That kids themselves won’t get seriously ill. That somehow you can get through this thing without having to worry about new cases. That as long as the hospitals aren’t overwhelmed and people aren’t dying in the streets, it’s okay. 

What the government’s doing is betting heavily here on vaccines and tests, hoping to keep the number of cases down to a manageable level until those save our hash. And it may work. In the meantime, forgive me if I scratch where it itches. I like our hash. I don’t want to see us lose it.

The Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health says that vaccinating children and teenagers could be the way out of this mess,  but the vaccine trials involving kids have only just begun. We should hear the results in six months or so. That’s not a quick hash-saver.

*

Another detail that makes me itch as we poke our collective nose into the open air is that healthcare workers still don’t have proper protective equipment. Twenty healthcare bodies have written  to the prime minister about this. In response, the prime minister rumpled his hair and asked if he didn’t look cute. 

Okay, what the government actually said was that it was monitoring the evidence and would update advice “where necessary.” And by the way, didn’t the prime minister look cute?

Healthcare workers are four times more likely to become infected than the rest of us, and within hospitals people working in intensive care have gotten the highest grade protective equipment, but it turns out that people working on the general wards have double their rate of infection–and less effective protective gear.

But, what the hell, the country’s only had a year to get this right. And we do have a prime minister who knows how to rumple his hair.

Meanwhile, the government is paying consultants to locate the protective equipment that it owns and that it stored someplace, although no one person knows exactly where. Billions of pounds worth of the stuff is stashed here and there.

“We have amounts in containers, in storage around the country; there are some on the docks and there are some en route from China,” the auditor general said. 

I wonder if that’s what’s on the floor by my computer. If so, I’d really like it out of there when the prime minister’s done with his hair. It was only supposed to be there for a couple of days. 

Some of the equipment will go out of date if it’s not used. Some of it is needed in hospitals and (yup, see above) isn’t available. Some of it–possibly all of it–was bought by external consultants at inflated prices and I should have known better than to let them store it on my floor but they were being so damn nice. 

Anyway, they don’t seem to have a central system to track all this, so they’re paying consultants to figure out what they own and where they can find it. 

You’d laugh if it weren’t so expensive. 

 

The sciency stuff

Lab studies have confirmed that the mutation common to the British, South African, and Brazillian variants really does make Covid more contagious than the original form. The initial argument was based on modeling, and I was holding out for confirmation, thinking that maybe the variants had just gotten lucky. Now, damn them, the scientists have given me what I asked for. So yup, it’s more contagious.

New York and California–not to be left out–have developed (or found, since we don’t really know where any of the variants first emerged) variants of their own. Let’s not panic about them until more is known. There’s always time for that later.

*

A new quick Covid test has been developed in France. It gives you a result in ten minutes–a third the time of the lateral flow tests–and it’s more accurate, although still not perfect. It’s 90% accurate, with the remaining 10% taking the form of both false negatives and false positives.

That’s good news, but it’s going into a three-month trial, so don’t rush out and try to buy a few thousand of them for your local school. 

*

The US Food and Drug Administration has said that Johnson & Johnson’s one-dose vaccine is both safe and effective. That’s not yet approval, but it’s a move in the right direction. If you don’t read past the headlines, you may not fall in love with it: It’s only 66% effective, which is lower than the be-sequined two-dose vaccines that crossed the finish line first and got all the cheering.

Read past the headlines, though.

The vaccine was tested in the US, several Latin American countries (sorry–I don’t know which ones), and South Africa, and 66% is the number that comes out of the jar once you pour all those results together and shake them. In the US, it was “much closer” to the be-sequined numbers. The effectiveness depended on which variants were prevalent in which countries. 

How much closer is “much closer”? In the US, it’s 72% effective. In South Africa, 57%. After that, I run out of numbers. Sorry. 

That’s still not in the 90% zones of the star vaccines, but all the vaccines (“all” here means the ones that have been approved in the US, but may well include others that are in use around the world) are 100% effective at preventing hospitalization and death. That’s no small thing. 

 

Creativity and lockdown
In a recent blog post, Emma Cownie asked, Can the boredom of lockdown push us to be more creative? For her, the answer has been yes, and it’s also worked that way for Peter Quinn, who creates special effects for a living. You know special effects–those things we see in movies that kids think are real and adults–um, yeah, we sometimes think they are as well. I won’t try to describe what he’s done, but he’s created a few sequences just to make himself laugh, and he’s strung them together in a video clip. 

They made me laugh too. Go on. Watch it. It’s good for your immune system.

How to get to work on time in the 19th century

Posted on by
41

Question: In an age before alarm clocks (and then in the one before affordable alarm clocks), how did anyone get to work on time? 

Answer, at least in parts of Britain: Starting in the nineteenth century, they got woken up by a knocker-upper. 

Digression: In American, if you’re knocked up, you’re pregnant. (This does not apply to the male of the species.) In British, though, you can knock up some scrambled eggs without anyone giving birth to little baby scrambled eggs. Knocking something up means you’re building it “very quickly, using whatever materials are available.” In the case of our example, we’ll hope that’s eggs, not cement blocks. 

Being knocked up can also–in British–mean being tired. 

But more to the point, you can knock someone up by pounding on their door when they’re asleep. 

Or on their window.

For the sake of clarity, reproduction takes place in the same way in both countries, it’s only the language that changes. Let’s say you’re talking about waking someone up. By knocking. Take two words, knock and up. Now combine them and shake and you’ll get one of those things we call a phrase–a small number of words that, over and over again, spot each other across a crowded room, run into each other’s arms, and form a unit of meaning.

The American meaning? It dates back at least to 1830 and I can’t begin to explain why it means what it does, but all the same it does.

Where were we?

People were going to work. It was the beginning of the nineteenth century, bang-slam in the midst of the industrial revolution. Industry was (and is) a regimented beast. It depended on everyone being in their place at the same time. Keeping your job meant getting up at the right time.

 

A rare relevant photo. This is a knocker-upper from London. She was known for using a peashooter to wake people up.

Enter the knocker-upper

Actually, knocker-uppers didn’t enter. They walked down a street and tapped on windows, or possibly doors, and they kept going. Because they got paid by the head, and if they were going to make a living they had to get a move on. Getting your butt out of bed was up to you. 

Most of them carried a long pole so they could reach an upstairs window. One, Mary Smith, was known for using a pea shooter. Others carried soft hammers or (so I’ve read) rattles. I’m skeptical about the rattles, because they wouldn’t want to wake the neighbors. Not just because they’d complain, but because they’d be waking them up for free. 

We’ll talk about payment in a minute.

As an aside, you might’ve noticed that “upstairs window” is a little vague. In Britain the floor up one flight of stairs is the first floor. In the U.S., it’s the second floor. The two countries put the numbers in the same order, but they start counting in different places.

Knocker-uppers tended to be old men or women. Does that mean the women were old or just that they were women? I’m not sure. The source I stole the information from lists them that way, either because they didn’t notice that the words can be understood two different ways or because they were doing what I am and dodging the issue. I’m just going to duck behind this nice potted begonia over here and pretend it has nothing to do with me. 

Just think of the women as being a kind of upstairs window.

Don’t think about it too hard.

Occasionally cops worked as knocker-uppers while they were on their rounds, earning a bit of extra income since they were up anyway. Robert Paul, who found the body of Jack the Ripper’s first victim, saw a cop and told him about the dead woman but the cop was knocking people up and couldn’t be bothered.

“I saw [a policeman] in Church-row,” Paul said at the inquest, “just at the top of Buck’s-row, who was going round calling people up. And I told him what I had seen, and I asked him to come, but he did not say whether he should come or not. He continued calling the people up, which I thought was a great shame, after I had told him the woman was dead.”

Knocker-uppers were particularly common in northern mill towns and in London, where dock workers’ shifts changed with the tides, although they also worked in smaller cities and towns. The trade went into decline in the 1940s and 1950s, and the last knocker-upper is thought to have retired in 1973.

I’m not sure why anyone was still paying a knocker-upper in 1972. Maybe out of loyalty. Or because they liked the personal touch.

 

Who paid? 

Customers paid by the week. A knocker-upper named Mrs. Waters (from somewhere in the north of England) told a Canadian newspaper in  1878, “All who were knocked up before four o’clock paid … eighteen pence a week; those who had to be awakened . . . after four gave . . . a shilling a week; whilst those who had to be aroused from five to six o’clock paid from sixpence to threepence weekly, according to time and distance.” She said she “never earned less than thirty shillings a week; mostly thirty five; and . . . as high as forty shillings a week.” 

There were twelve pence in a shilling. I’ll leave you to figure out who got a bargain while I hide behind that begonia again.

How much of a person’s pay would that eat? These were low-wage workers, and in 1880 a male laborer’s average pay was £30 a year; a woman’s was £15. A pound was made up of 20 shillings, and a family’s budget would have had next to no give in it. Still, the knocker-upper’s price had to be within a working person’s reach. 

Mrs. Waters also talked about her customers tapping back to let her know they’d heard her–some cheerily and some complaining and swearing the whole time. 

To keep the times and places straight, knockers-up chalked times on sidewalks and buildings, and some may have hung up signs.

Who woke up the knocker-upper? Themselves, for the most part. They were night owls, sleeping during the day. Think of them as people who worked the graveyard shift. 

How did they know what time it was? Nothing I’ve found addresses this, but cities and towns had clocks–they were an important civic show-off item–and even if you couldn’t look at your wrist and know if you were two minutes ahead of schedule, you’d get a nice loud bong every fifteen minutes, and a count on the hour. When I was a kid–we’re going back to the 1950s here–stores still had clocks in their front windows and long before I had a watch I could walk down the street from clock to clock and know the time. 

Women, men, and meetings: Jackie Weaver’s advice about Zoom

Posted on by
32

If you’re British, you’ve heard of Jackie Weaver. If you’re not British but spend too much of your life on the internet, you’ve probably also heard of Jackie Weaver.

Weaver was drafted in from the Cheshire Association of Local Councils to host a Zoom meeting of the Handforth Parish Council’s planning and environment committee and act as clerk in the regular clerk’s absence. The council has a history of toxic procedural arguments, and the meeting was called by two committee members, not the chair. Should we speculate and guess that the chair wasn’t happy about that?

He told Weaver she had no authority. She threatened to remove him from the meeting and he said, “You can’t. It’s only the chair who can remove people from the meeting. You have no authority here, Jackie Weaver. No authority at all”

Zap. He disappeared. She’s removed him from the meeting. You can hear someone else saying, “She just kicked him out.”

“She kicked him out,” someone echoed.

I waited for a chorus line to come in, full of sequins and doing high kicks, singing, “She kicked him out,” but parish council budgets are tight, so no chorus line. No high kicks. Local government’s like that. You should see parish council meetings in my village. For a long time, they didn’t even have heat.

When two more members of the meeting shouted and blustered, she tossed them out as well, so they could get some work done. 

“This is a meeting called by two councilors,” Weaver says. “You may now elect a chair.”

One of the people who was still in the meeting proceeded to complain that the chair had been calling himself the clerk. 

“There is no way of stopping him from calling himself clerk,” Weaver said. “Please refer to me as Britney Spears from now on.”

Irrelevant photo: Red sky in the morning, be careful what you say in a Zoom meeting.

No one would have known any of this if a seventeen-year-old politics student, Shaan Ali, hadn’t watched it. He’s fascinated with local politics. All the power struggles. All the arguments. All the technological disasters. 

“You know, old men struggling to use Zoom, fun arguments–there’s always something fascinating going on.”

He tweeted it and it went mad. Weaver became an overnight sensation, interviewed on TV, written about almost a month late in obscure corners of the internet. What she did resonates with every woman who’s ever been bullied or patronized by a man, which is to say 116% of us. It may be on the very mildest edge of our collective revenge fantasies, but the thing is that it actually happened. That’s better than flying kicks, although I’d still like the chorus line.

It’s appealed to plenty of men as well, helped along, I expect, by the cartoonishly stuffed-shirt quality of the chair. He’d patronize anyone he wasn’t sucking up to. He couldn’t help himself. You can find a clip here.

Predictably enough, as soon as she became a hero, she started receiving online abuse, which the police are investigating, for whatever good that’ll do.

The council’s getting its own share of abuse. At the next meeting, members of the public joined the Zoom call and shouted lines from the more famous meeting, turning the thing into chaos. I’m sure I should disapprove, but I love the idea of a meeting being disrupted by random strangers shouting, “You have no authority here, Jackie Weaver.”

I’m sure it’s a character flaw. It’s one of my favorites.

But let’s leave Handforth on a more peaceful  note. An internet baker (who knew there was such a thing?) named Ben Cullen created a Jackie Weaver cake. Lockdown does strange things to people. I won’t say he flattered her exactly, but he says he’s had a great response. 

The last word, surely, has to go to Weaver. Someone asked if she had any advice for Zoom meetings. 

“Don’t wear pajamas,” she said. 

*

You’ve probably heard that the head of the Tokyo Olympics committee resigned after saying that women talked too much and made meetings too long. 

What you probably don’t know is that in 2019 Montreal city councilor Sue Montgomery started knitting in red when a man was speaking and in green when a woman spoke. The piece she produced is almost entirely red. And it’s a lousy piece of knitting.

I say that as someone who’s not very good at knitting either, but I can knit a straight scarf. Never mind. I never knit anything that made a point as neatly.

The council’s divided fairly evenly–31 women and 34 men, and it’s not, she said, that the women don’t speak, it’s that they tend to use their time more efficiently. “Some of the older men tend to go on and on,” she said. “Some of them can’t be bothered to gather and organize their thoughts before speaking.” 

 

Another Zoom meeting goes to hell in a handbasket

The entire board of a California elementary school resigned after thinking they were holding a private meeting when in fact they were being live-streamed. 

“Are we alone?” one of them asked.

Oh, yeah, absolutely, someone or other said. 

And they believed it and let loose. Parents just wanted the school to babysit their kids, they said. Parents wanted the kids out of the house so they could take drugs. Parents complained, the school board members complained. 

All while they were being live-streamed into the parents’ ear canals

Seven thousand people signed a petition calling on them to resign. 

You’re never alone. 

 

Art news from Italy

Italian police found a stolen painting–a 500-year-old copy of a Leonardo da Vinci–and returned it to the museum that didn’t know it had lost it. The museum had been shut for months. After all, in the middle of a pandemic who goes around counting frames to make sure all the paintings got back on the school bus at the end of the class trip? 

How did the police happen to find the painting? Haven’t a clue, but it was hidden in what a British paper called a bedroom cupboard. I think that’s what I’d call a closet, since I tend to keep my cupboards in the kitchen, where I keep my cups. But, as I often say, I’ll never really understand this country. As a general rule, the police aren’t running in and out of here making sure I haven’t hidden a 500-year-old painting behind the (empty) sugar bowl in the cupboard, so I’m going to guess the guy they arrested did something that called attention to himself. 

The Smithsonian didn’t mention the cupboard but, not to be outdone by a British paper, mentioned that in the picture Christ has corkscrew curls. They were still popular when Shirley Temple was making movies. If that doesn’t put you off them, I don’t know what will. 

Two ways Covid isn’t transmitted

Posted on by
55

A study says there’s no evidence that Covid’s passed on by what researchers so delicately describe as fecal-oral transmission. 

Tell me I don’t need to translate that for you. 

Diarrhea can be a Covid symptom, and testing sewage is a way to track the presence of Covid and its variants in a community. And toilets really do send up a plume of aerosols when you flush them (unless there’s a lid and you close it–and sit on it to make sure it doesn’t open spontaneously and facilitate a jailbreak). But even so, there’s no evidence that a toilet’s to blame for anyone having caught the virus. 

It sounds like the only danger public toilets present is if they’re unventilated: You’ll be sharing air with other people. But then you would in a store. Or a workplace.  

Food is also looking like an unlikely way to transmit the disease. Several things work against Covid being transmitted by food. It can’t multiply there–it needs to be inside a host. It hates heat (although it likes cold). And it’s unlikely to survive in any place as acidic as the stomach. 

People whose Covid infections take the form of digestive problems probably didn’t get it from anything they ate. It’s a question of whether the virus turned right or left once it got into their bodies by way of the nose or mouth. 

Irrelevant photo: A cheery yellow flower to take your mind off toilets. This is a lesser celandine–one of the year’s early flowers.

To keep Covid out of our digestive tracts, we might borrow Britain’s idea way of foiling the German invasion they were afraid would happen in World War II: They took down all the road signs and railroad station signs. If Germany really had invaded, its soldiers would still be wandering around Cornwall and wondering if they were in Pityme or Splatt.

Yes, both towns are real.

*

Last summer, a cluster of England’s beaches were mobbed by people who’d traveled from elsewhere for a day out. And we’re using elsewhere as a code word for anyone who in the middle of a pandemic isn’t welcome wherever here happens to be. The news was full of photos of people packed so close together that they looked like their heads were popping out of each other’s pockets.

Some of that, presumably, was the magical foreshortening that comes from using a telephoto lense, but never mind that. There were still a lot of people. 

We all talked about the photos. We tutted. We battened down the hatches–whatever that involves–and waited for the local outbreaks to hit.

We, you understand, means anyone who didn’t take a day off to go to the beach. Plus anyone who lived locally and could get to the beach without a day trip. Speaking as a lives-locally myself, we have a yes-no relationship with visitors. The economy depends on them. And it’s awfully nice when they’re not around. Especially during a pandemic.

But the outbreak never came–not from the beaches. Admittedly, the test and trace system here is beyond useless, but still. According to Dr. Muge Cevik, a lecturer in infectious diseases and medical virology, “We have known for some time that only about 10% of transmission events are linked to outdoor activities. Even those events generally involve either prolonged close contact or a mixture of indoor and outdoor time.”

The message, basically, is that the important places for transmission are indoors.

 

Long Covid

A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study tells us (and of course no one else; we’re their special friends) that 35% of people with mild Covid don’t get back to their earlier state of health within two to three weeks. That’s counting from when the symptoms started. That may not sound as scary as it is. It can go on for a hell of a lot longer than two or three weeks and may mean they can’t go back to work, can’t get back to what used to be normal life, can’t walk to the corner and back. 

That 35% isn’t just the old and the disabled. It includes previously healthy 18- to 34-year-olds: 20% of them end up in the category. And 33% of people who had Covid but weren’t hospitalized (I think at this point we’ve included people who had moderate Covid, not just mild) still have symptoms up to three months later. 

How are we supposed to read “up to” in this context? 

Beats me. 

How does that compare with the flu? 

Only 10% of people who catch the flu are sick after two weeks days. But if you’re determined to catch the flu as a way to avoid Covid, you should understand that (1) it’s not an either/or choice; you’re more than welcome to catch both, and (B) at least in Britain just now, the flu is hard to catch. Lockdown’s turning it into an endangered species. Or maybe that’s Brexit–it’s still wrestling with the customs forms. Either way, the stores are finding it hard to keep in stock.

The better news is that long Covid is starting to get attention from researchers, doctors, and scientists. And opera singers. 

 

The cost of Covid

The planet’s lost an estimated 20.5 million years of life to Covid. That works out to an average of 16 years of life per death.

 

Pubs and an end to lockdown

Is there a safe way for pubs to reopen? 

A British study from the last time they opened up leaves me skeptical. At least until you find a way to keep drinkers first from getting drunk or if they will get drunk, from acting like drunks. But that wasn’t the scientific answer, so let’s back up and take another run at it.

At the end of Britain’s first lockdown, pubs were given guidelines to keep everyone safe (or to at least gave the illusion that everyone was safe). And pubs did try to adapt. They made more room between the tables–that sort of thing. But in some staff didn’t wear masks and in others they wore them only until they needed to talk, when they’d pull them off. Which sort of defeats the purpose of wearing masks, but then customers weren’t wearing the when they ate or drank, so I could see why they might not have taken this thing seriously.

Lines formed because rooms were laid out and the way people moved through them. It created pinch points. And customers shouted, projecting the virus into the air if they had it. They hugged each other. They table-hopped. They sang. 

Give the British alcohol and they sing. 

Staff rarely intevened, or they made gestures in that direction but didn’t change anything. Maybe they didn’t take the issue seriously. Maybe they didn’t think they had much authority. Maybe they really didn’t.

The study didn’t address the underlying problem, which is that you can’t wear a mask and eat or drink, and if you get a bunch of maskless people in an enclosed space during a Covid pandemic you’re not running a pub, you’re running a germ exchange. 

 

Vaccine news

Research on the Pfizer vaccine reports that a single injection is 85% effective after 15 to 28 days, which means that putting off the second shot won’t be a disaster. That’s a relief for Britain, which bet its chips–every last one of them–on that. The study left some loopholes that a creative virus could wiggle through if it had the determination, but never mind, we’ll take our good news where we can find it.

Pfizer itself now says its vaccine will survive in a standard freezer for as long as two weeks–longer than it had originally thought. That makes it easier for pharmacies and doctors’ offices to work with.

*

Our friends the scientists are working on vaccines that will target not just the spike protein but a new spot on the Covid virus, the N protein. Since the mutations we’ve been seeing–at least the worrying ones–are on the spike proteins, this may put us a step ahead of the virus, at least for a while. They’re hoping to start clinical trials soon. 

And a different group of scientists is working on a vaccine that would–if all goes well–create an immunity in the nose and throat, which are Covid’s superhighway. Convince the antibodies to set up shop there and you could keep the virus from infecting anyone else. Once that happens, you’re well on the way toward ending the pandemic.

Or at least slowing it down. Let’s not get too enthusiastic about this.

*

Britain’s vaccination project has worked its way from the old and creaky to the somewhat old and not-yet-creaky, as well as to the medically vulnerable–people with diabetes, say, or heart conditions. People who are severely overweight. And it was the last condition that led a doctor’s office to contact Liam Thorpe and say he was eligible for a vaccination. They calculated that he had a body mass index of 28,000.

The body mass index? Oh, that’s simple. You take your weight in kilos and your height in meters and you square one of them and draw a line under the other and then do some terrifying mathematicky things with it all. Then you look grimly at the result, because whatever it is, if you’re part of the culture I live in, you’ll figure you need to lose weight. At least you will if you’re female. The ideal woman is so thin she’s invisible. 

Invisibility is sexy. And gets a lot of social approval. It’s the rare woman who–even if she knows this is bullshit–who’s completely immune.

If your body mass index is over 25, official statistics agree with you: You’re overweight. But a bmi over 28,000 is–should we say it’s unusual? 

How did Thorpe get to that size? Well, he’s 6’2”, but the computer system was speaking metric when his height was entered, so he ended up measuring 6.2 centimeters. Which (or so I’ve read) is roughly the length of your thumb. Or someone’s thumb. I haven’t met yours. For all I know, your thumb is 6’2”. 

It must be awkward buying gloves. 

Somehow during the phone call Thorpe unraveled the problem and said he should wait for his real category to be called before he got vaccinated.

In an article about it, he wrote, “If I had been less stunned I would have asked why no one was more concerned that a man of these remarkable dimensions was slithering around south Liverpool.”

After his story ran in the Guardian,a letter to the editor said that the writer’s daughter’s height had been entered into the computer as 1.7 cm. She figures that gives her the body mass index of five blue whales. 

Art v. Covid: Round one goes to the opera singers

Posted on by
37

The English National Opera is becalmed in a windless pandemic sea (and beset by overcooked metaphors), but it’s putting its expertise to use by teaching breathing exercises to people struggling with long Covid. On Zoom, of course. Because nothing happens in person anymore. 

Jenny Mollica, who runs the opera company’s outreach program, started hearing about long Covid–the chest pains, the exhaustion, but above all the breathlessness– and thought, “Opera is rooted in breath. That’s our expertise.” Maybe, she thought, the company had something to offer.

She got hold of Dr. Sarah Elkin, a respiratory therapist in the National Health Service, who thought, Why not? 

Yes, I know. I’m claiming to know an awful lot about what people who aren’t me thought. But I’m stealing the information straight from what they said, so we’re on relatively safe ground.

Irrelevant photo: Primroses.

Elkin and her team had some drug treatments they could try patients on, but beyond that they didn’t have a lot to offer. And Elkin used to sing jazz, so she understood first hand what vocal training could do.

They recruited a dozen participants, and one of them said in an interview that in everything he’d done since recovering from Covid, “I was struggling for air.” Even a few of the simple breathing exercises made a huge difference. “The program really does help. Physically, mentally, in terms of anxiety.”

In addition to exercises, they sing, working with lullabies from around the world. They’re easy to learn and they’re soothing, since anxiety is as much an issue for the participants as breath.

Just reading about it, I feel better. If you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go hum a lullaby to the cat. 

 

Ultraviolet light and Covid

A reader and frequent comment-leaver, Peter Wetherill, has been telling me about UV-C light as a way to battle Covid, and I got intrigued enough to see what I could learn about it. The internet isn’t exactly awash in information on the subject, but it does have a bit, so here’s what I’ve been able to sort out. 

Ultraviolet radiation–let’s call it UV, since we’re friends–comes in three flavors: A, B, and C. They’re not the most exciting flavors nature ever created,and that’s probably why you don’t hear about them on cooking shows and why no one’s given them more exciting names. But they’re what we’ve got to work with, so will you pipe down so we can get some work done?

We’re used to A and B, even if we don’t know it. If you use sunscreen, they’re what you’re blocking. Give them enough time and opportunity and they’ll damage the skin, no matter how dark skinned you are, and they don’t do the eyes any favors either. But it takes them a good long while to do their damage. Basically, our bodies have learned to live with them.

C, though, gets blocked by the earth’s ozone layer, so we and our many germs have all evolved without protection to it. It kills germs. It’ll also damage the hell out of people. So that’s the promise and that’s the problem, all neatly wrapped around each other. Can you separate one from the other to clear our public spaces of Covid?

Answer, yes-but.

Robots have been armed with UV-C so they can disinfect the surfaces of empty planes and subway cars. That’s useful but only up to a point. Problem one, Covid doesn’t spread primarily through surface deposits. As far as they’ve been able to trace the beast, airborne transmission’s the main culprit. And problem two, the minute you let people back into the space, it’s no longer clean. Because you know what we’re like. 

UV-C can also be adapted to clean N-95 masks, but its ability to sanitize depends on (problem three) the light hitting the virus directly. If some of the viruses are covered by a fiber or by dirt, the virus wins a round. If some bit of the mask is shadowed, any virus living there wins a round. In an experiment with Staphylococcus aureus, the kill rate varied as much as 500-fold depending on the angle of the light. So it generally takes three UV systems to disinfect a hospital room, and they won’t get everything. The surfaces still need to be cleaned the old-fashioned way.

Why bother? Because they’ll kill viruses and bacteria that the old-fashioned cleaning would have missed.

All of this, remember, has to be done away from human skin and eyes, because we never evolved any protection against it. So you have to clear people out before you can do it. 

What about cleaning the air? It can do that. 

One approach is to install UV-C units in the air ducts of ventilation systems, where no one goes unless they’re in some movie, there’s tense music in the background, and everyone watching suspends what little they know about reality. Using it this way could prevent, for example, what may have happened in a quarantine hotel in New Zealand where the ventilation system (may have; it’s not certain) helpfully moved the virus from one room to another. 

Another way to use UV-C is to install the units close to the ceiling, carefully calculating what it’ll take to miss even the tallest people and being careful not to let the light scatter downwards. Fixtures of that sort cost a couple of thousand dollars each and can be used in waiting rooms, in corridors, and in other badly ventilated places where people gather or pass through and breathe. It sounds like they’ll reliably kill off any germs in their line of sight–but only in their line of sigh. So they clear the upper reaches of the room but not the lower ones.

We’re almost done here. Stay with me, because there’s another possibility, called far UV-C, which is on a different wavelength and don’t ask me about that, please. For reasons best known to itself and to people who actually understand this stuff, it hardly penetrates the outer layer of human skin and, at least in albino rats, doesn’t cause eye damage. If you’re an albino rat, this is good news. But it does still kill viruses and bacteria. So you could use it in a room full of people without worrying about how tall people are or how much of the aerosols they breasted out hang in the lower air. 

David Sliney, retired manager of the U.S. Army’s Laser and Optical Radiation Program said, “There is some evidence that it may even be more effective against airborne viruses” than other UV light. 

This is still in the range of may and some evidence, remember. And again, it only cleans what it can directly hit. The virus underneath your book? It’s safe. The virus hiding in your shadow? It’s safe until you move your shadow. But since most aerosols (and as it happens, the ones we need to worry about) will be floating around somewhere in the room’s air, it can reasonably be expected to unleash a wholesale viral slaughter.

If you’re planning to try this, you need a krypton-chlorine excimer lamp, but they have built-in problems, because they also generate light on a different wavelength–a damaging wavelength.

Back to the drawing board. 

You could filter the lamp–we’ll come back to that–or you could use a far UV-C LED lamp, which is a great idea except that they don’t exist yet, and that’s a problem. It all has to do with wavelengths and efficiency. Get the wavelength right and the efficiency falls off a cliff. Get the efficiency right and the wavelength’s wrong.

That drives us back to excimer lamps. The article I’m linking to expects them to be on the market by early 2021.

Hang on. This is early 2021. You could even argue that it’s late-early 2021. So–as my brother used to ask on car trips–are we there yet? 

Sort of. I asked Lord Google about filtered excimer lamps, and after leading me through some odd corners of the internet, including one involving fishpond sterilizers, I did find some. I think. But first I found some box-like gizmos that draw air in, sterilize it, and breathe it back out so that humans aren’t exposed to UV-C but the virus is.  

I also found a “far UV-C excimer lamp module for microbial reduction applications.” It cleans surfaces and air, it can be used in occupied and unoccupied rooms, and I’m sure the website says how much it costs somewhere but believe me, they’re not leading with that information. Let’s assume it’s expensive, but then so’s death.

In spite of the limited offerings on the internet, the article I’ve drawn most of my information from (it’s published by the IEEE Spectrum) says that “the current pandemic may yet come and go before the world has rolled out germicidal UV broadly enough to make a big impact. And so experts are already planning for the next dangerous pathogen, and when it comes, they hope to greet it with a phalanx of UV air purifiers and surface sterilizers in hospitals, airports, public transit, offices, schools, nursing homes, stores, restaurants, elevators, and elsewhere. The ubiquity of UV technology should make it much harder for an outbreak to spread, perhaps preventing a lethal contagion from ever becoming a pandemic.”

If–like me–you’re wondering what IEEE stands for, it stands for IEEE. You may have to join before they’ll tell you anything more than name, rank, and serial number. It’s a technical professional organization that’s interested in technology. And professionalism. And sounds like the scream of someone falling off a cliff: I-EEEEEEEEEEEEEeeee.

Oh, hell, I don’t know what it does, but it’s big. At least compared to other technical professional organizations. 

By way of a second source, you can find a fairly small bit about it from the FDA–the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

Just when we thought American isolationism was over . . .

Posted on by
82

The Americas are moving away from Africa and Europe at the heart-stopping speed of four centimeters a year. If you plan to row the Atlantic, do it now. Your trip’s only going to get longer. 

I couldn’t find any parallel mention of either the Pacific or some continents getting smaller, but systems have only so much give in them, and what’s gained in one place has to show up as a loss somewhere else. What I’m saying is that if that old pair of jeans suddenly fits again, the credit may not go to your new diet, it’s more likely to go to the Atlantic Ocean. 

 

Zoom news

You’ve probably seen this already (and if you haven’t, you may be the only person on the planet keeping that category open), but that’s not going to stop me from telling you about it: A lawyer in Texas appeared in court, via Zoom, to to argue a case while disguised as a cat. 

Actually, a kitten. If you play the video–and if you haven’t, you really should–you can see his little kitten mouth explaining to the judge, as we all have to at some point in our lives, that he’s not a cat.

“I can see that,” the judge said soberly, although what he was seeing was that the lawyer was in fact a cat. Which proves that witnesses are expected to tell the truth but judges don’t have to. And that we can’t always believe the evidence of our own lyin’ eyes. 

Also that the English language uses the word see loosely.

A rare relevant photo: This is Fast Eddie. He is a cat–on Zoom, off Zoom, in any and all situations. He is also, it’s worth noting, not a lawyer. But he is slightly out of focus. It’s not his fault. 

I don’t know if any of this will give the defendant grounds to appeal, but some inventive lawyer could have a wonderful time with it. 

The lawyer’s not the only person who’s been trapped by Zoom filters since the pandemic forced many odd things to go online. Lizet Ocampo, the political director of People for the American Way, appeared at a work meeting as a potato and couldn’t un-potato herself. 

“As a progressive organization, we fight for justice for all and access to opportunities, and in the last three-plus years, it’s been a little tough,” she said (irrelevantly) after one someone in the meeting took a screenshot and put it on social media. “I just kind of gave up and stayed as a potato for the rest of the call.”

What makes her comment relevant is that an organization that fights for justice should recognize the importance of its directors understanding–at first hand if possible–how hard it is for potatoes to get taken seriously. Ocampo, I trust, now has a visceral understanding of the problem. 

Congressman Emmer, from Minnesota, appeared at a Congressional hearing upside down, with his head disconnected from any recognizable body part, pretty much stopping any sort of sensible discussion. Contributions included, “Is this a metaphor?” “At least you’re not a cat,” and “You could stand on your head.”

 

Food news

Which brings us neatly to our next topic: Scientists have engineered spinach plants to send emails. 

What, you ask, does a spinach plant have to say and why would it want to say it to us, not to another spinach plant? Well, at the moment, the plant doesn’t get to choose. The email will say that the plant found nitroaromatics in the groundwater and the email will go to the scientists. 

Nitroaromatics in groundwater are a sign that explosives might be nearby, and their presence triggers the plant to send a signal, which an infrared camera picks up. Then the camera sends the email. 

Think of the camera as the spinach plant’s office assistant.

We’ve reached a point where no one thinks it’s strange that a camera sends an email, right? Or that your toaster has opinions about your Facebook posts?

What this means, sadly, is that no one wants the spinach plant’s opinion, it’s just a conduit for information that scientists want. 

“Plants are very good analytical chemists,” said Professor Michael Strano, who led the research. “They have an extensive root network in the soil, are constantly sampling groundwater, and have a way to self-power the transport of that water up into the leaves.”

They could, potentially, be set up to send emails related to climate change. 

When I walked past my spinach plants yesterday, I heard them whisper, “We feel so used.” 

I gave them Ocampo’s email address.

*

I don’t know why anyone should believe me on this next item, since I can’t prove it by embedding a link. I’m taking my information from a Twitter ad, which if the culprits have any sense will have been taken down by now, but the makers of Weetabix teamed up with Heinz Corp. and advertised–

Okay, you know how British foodies are trying to rehabilitate the reputation of British food? No? Never mind. They are. And it’s important to them, so the rest of us can just play nice, please, and not do what Weetabix and Heinz have done, which was a very unpleasant playground trick involving dry Weetabix and baked beans. Or more specifically, Weetabix with baked beans poured over them. And offered to the world as something to eat. 

Voluntarily.

What is or are Weetabix? Allegedly, a breakfast cereal, although I have tried the stuff and wasn’t convinced. It (I ate less than one, so let’s commit ourselves to the singular) is wheatish and shaped like a raft with rounded corners. Or like a dish sponge. Dry, it tastes like straw. Wet, it tastes like bread that you soaked overnight in lukewarm water. 

Yes, I know: Someone out there loves it/them. Possibly even you. And I respect that, although you’re making a terrible mistake, possibly even wasting the part of your life that you spend eating breakfast. But hey, who am I to judge?

Someone with a blog and no editor to keep me from writing myself over a cliff edge, that’s who. 

But if I go so far as to admit that I could be wrong about Weetabix (and I’m fairly sure I haven’t), I think even people who like Weetabix, or who at least respect them, will admit that pairing them up with baked beans is one of those errors in judgement that comes from being in lockdown too long. 

If you’re good with technology, you might be able to find the ad and turn it into a Zoom filter, then appear at your next job interview as baked beans on Weetabix. The way the job market is these days, how good were your chances anyway?

*

The History of Parliament blog called my attention to a new electronic tool that lets researchers (along with any fool who stumbles in after them) search parliamentary debates and find out how many times a word like, say, Brexit shows up. So someone’s used it to search for all mentions of the word cucumber. 

Come on, someone had to do it. Let’s be glad they just went ahead and got it over with.

The news–and I know this will surprise you–is that it doesn’t come up often. Even in a debate about the Tomatoes and Cucumbers Marketing Board in 1950.

No, I can’t make this stuff up. I’m too earthbound.

I may be misreading this, but the introductory paragraph seems to say that the word’s never been used but later on the post produces an example of when it was used: in December 4, 1656, right in the midst of Oliver Cromwell’s protectorate. We don’t think of that as a particularly funny time, but during a debate about the rights and privileges of the burghs (don’t ask, because what’s important here is the cucumber), the discussion got increasingly convoluted and MP Philip Jones compared it “to the dressing of a cucumber. First pare, and order, and dress it, and throw it out of the window.”

Reword that and you’d get a laugh. It’s all in the delivery. 

 

Archeology

A four-year-old walking the beach with her parents spotted a dinosaur footprint. It’s 220 million years old and was preserved in the mud. No one’s sure what kind of dinosaur left it but it would’ve been small and walked on two legs.

It was on a beach called the Bendricks, in Wales, which the South Wales group of the Geologists’ Association called “the best site in Britain for dinosaur tracks of the Triassic Period.

*

A couple of prehistoric teeth found in Jersey may be evidence that modern humans didn’t displace Neanderthals but merged with them. The teeth come from two different people and combine features of both modern humans and Neanderthals, suggesting that the blend was common in the population. Modern humans and Neanderthals overlapped by 5,000 years, which is a long enough time to get acquainted, even outside of speed-dating situations.