ArsTechnica has a thoroughly researched and very well-written article about how well the COVID-19 vaccines protect and whether they are worth getting if you have already been infected by any of the virus’s five variants: Read about the COVID-19 vaccine as at March 28th, 2022.
Some people believe, not inaccurately, that the people of the US are guilty of ignoring the rest of the world. As I discussed in an earlier post, if Americans knew how good the Scandinavians have it, they would not be voting the way they vote, or stomping around about the superiority of their country. The same is true of Britons. They vote against their best interests all the time, but the voting system there also reduces the need for compromise…
I am reading The Selfish Gene at the moment. It’s a very good book, and beautifully written, as you would expect from Dawkins. This pair of sentences, though, stood out for their disappointing relevance to anti-vaccination, anti-mask, and otherwise anti-scientific individuals’ behavior. In the next paragraph, “ESS” means “evolutionary stable strategy”. In (too simple a summary), ESS means the strategy that evolution ‘settles upon’ which is most effective at reproducing the genes that regulate that strategy. “It is possible for…
Each country (and each State in the USA) is vaccinating its people using its own method. Here’s how the race to vaccinate the populaces is going: You will find more infographics at Statista
COVID-19 has brought into sharp relief some differences between people. Some of us are willing to limit our interactions with other people because, in our opinion, going to the cinema, or having our hair cut, is not important enough to risk long-term disease, or causing the death of others. I think that bears repeating. If you are taking unnecessary risks during this pandemic, you are taking this risk on behalf of others. If this pandemic had been responded to appropriately,…
It’s been a weird old time recently. I expect we will look back on this time with vague memories of how it felt. Some, like me, will remember being given back my commute time and being more efficient despite a tiny bit of network-slowness. Some have experienced the ‘Covid-19 experience’ popularized by the media: hundreds of exhausting Zoom, Webex, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams meetings Zoom-bombing having their children climb over their shoulder during a meeting, and feeling stir-crazy. Others,…
I thought about COVID-19 while I was flying to California a little while ago. This is what I wrote. Please forgive the stream-of-consciousness, but when I re-read it, I thought it was suitable to share. The world is under-going an event which will long be remembered. I don’t think, ultimately, it will be remembered as a health crisis – the number of lives lost might not turn out to be significant in the long-term – but it could have long-term…
As US airlines are accused of buying back shares, I thought it might be helpful to explain what buying back shares really means, and why you might want to sell and buy shares at all, if you’re a company. The airlines are being criticized because they might become short of cash now, as people stop flying and as the economy overall is likely to slow significantly. [That’s right, this is the third COVID-19 post in a row because, let’s be…
In my previous role as a Risk Manager at Just Group plc we developed plans to deal with pandemics and similar crises in workshops that brought together all the key decision makers involved in providing on-going service to customers and shareholders etc. Some of the things we considered were the closure of schools, the staff fearing going to work, and other things that are manifesting now. While no sane person can derive any positive emotions from the impacts we are experiencing now, from premature…