The COVID messaging wars - shouldn't the message be "the importance of consensus"?

Man, I'm sick of the COVID messaging/expertise wars.   I read the article yesterday in the AFR (which I can't link to now as paywall is up), about the fight between Nick Coatesworth and "Ozsage", which started:

A year ago, when he was Australia’s deputy chief medical officer, Nick Coatsworth told colleagues to watch out for a group of doctors and academics who, he felt, were so concerned by SARS-CoV-2 they would advocate for excessive measures against the virus.

Yet Coatesworth himself was partially wrong in his pooh-poohing of 25,000 a day from Omicron:

University of NSW modelling has suggested NSW could have up to 25,000 new cases a day by February - eight times higher than the current number. 

However, Dr Coatsworth slammed that figure as ­not 'accurate', challenging claims by clinical immunologist Dr Dan Suan that the state was 'sleepwalking into an Omicron disaster'.

Sure, you might say he turned out to be right "in the big picture" on his very early guess (because, really, that's all it could have been) that Omicron would result in much lower hospitalisation and might, maybe, be (kind of?) the end of COVID.   (Although, as far as I can tell, it is still completely unknown how much protection an Omicron infection might give against future variants.)  

I've complained from the start of the pandemic, pretty much, that people on all sides seemed to be overconfident of their positions on the basis of very clearly complicated and early information that would be very hard to sort out and take years in some cases to understand well.    

If anything, it has made me think of the importance of consensus in science and policy matters - you will always get a range of opinion even from normally credible experts, and there will always be the influence of personal and social political philosophy on expert's views as to how to respond.  But that doesn't mean that there is no such thing as valid expertise on which to draw reasonable policy responses.

The important thing, I think, should be is to look at a science and policy consensus position, and always have sufficient regard to the uncertainties of novel and evolving events.   

Pyramid scheme that also wastes huge amounts of energy

 

Has Boris Johnson given all Conservatives permission to look ridiculous?

 

Cost of weather and climate disasters in USA

The report by NOAA has some good analysis of the cost of weather/climate disasters in the US over recent years.  I took this screenshot from it:

A reminder:  conservative wingnuts obsess over the cost of BLM rioting - which was widely reported last year as probably ending up costing insurance between $1 to $2 billion.

Personal COVID update

My daughter started feeling over her COVID on Sunday, with no symptoms yesterday and today.  She (and the rest of the family) are supposed to have RAT's today, the 6th day after her positive test was taken, but the problem was - how to get them.   Apparently, there was a fair chance we could get them free if we went to a testing clinic, but as far as I know, people are still lining up for hours (whether in  or out of a car) to get processed.  (Last week, apparently, a friend of my daughter and her Mum went at 3 am to line up in their car for a test - and there were already 30 cars ahead of them.  It took until 9 am!)

So, although the official rules for isolation say that I wasn't supposed to leave the house, as I had taken a negative RAT last Friday, and did not have any symptoms since, yesterday I decided to check 4 or 5 chemists near me, mainly 3 Chemist Warehouse outlets.   No tests were to be found, and I went both in the morning and afternoon.  People were practically stalking delivery vans, asking the guy if his delivery included tests.   (I did ask too, at a smaller chemist.)    People are obviously very happy to use these tests, and pay for them, if only they were available.

But then, behold, Facebook did something useful for once, and I got a text at about 7.30pm from my worker that they were available at Coles nearest me.  They were selling only one pack per customer (or two tests), and so my wife (no symptoms either) came with me.  Success!

About to test my daughter...she will be irate if it's positive!

Update:  I reckon the test came back a clear "invalid".  Ugh.  I don't entirely trust this brand.  My son's test didn't seem to give a clear result either.

Update 2:  my wife and I tested negative, clearly.  That's good, at least.  Meanwhile, the government advice as to coming out of isolation for even the diagnosed is somewhat ambiguous.   Clearly, though, they are changing the rules almost every day to deal with the problem with testing such a large number of people who would like a test, but can't get their hands on one.

 

Richard's nutty obsession

I had to stop following this guy on Twitter, because his scores of oddball tweets every day were just too much to put up with, for the occasional one that I might be of genuine interest.  But someone else has re-tweeted this, and it did remind that I don't think I have posted before about his absolutely nutty obsession with the (alleged) outrageousness of children wearing masks.  Fortunately, some people in tweets are starting to tell him he's ridiculous:

 

Excess deaths and COVID - UK edition

I still don't know why it is that Sky News UK is allowed to be sensible and responsible in terms of its reporting and commentary on things like climate change and COVID, while Rupert wants Sky News Australia (at least at night) to be a wingnutty branch of Fox News in its takes.   

Anyway, this explanation and analysis today of excess deaths in the UK from COVID is well done:

 

It illustrates why I think the correct line to take with wingnuttery in the Australian blogosphere that insists this was never a "serious" pandemic is just "you are too stupid to engage with".  (The only trouble being, they vote!)

The cost of climate change

I think this is quite a balanced take on the matter of the increasing cost of natural disasters to the world, and the relationship with climate change, from DW News:

Don't Look Up: I see what you were trying to do there...

[This post contains spoilers, to a degree.]

Talk about a curate's egg (good in parts) of a movie:  the much discussed Don't Look Up on Netflix.  

On the upside:

* all of the actors are really good, and I thought that Mark Rylands as the self involved tech billionaire was excellent.  He's the sort of actor who seems to inhabit roles, rather than act them.

*  some of the satire of Trumpian politics worked well - especially the dumb son as Chief of Staff.  Meryl Streep herself wasn't bad, but the role as written was ambiguous - you never really could tell if she was just dumb, like Trump; or smart but just so self-involved as to be dangerous.

* sure, I get the overall intention of a satire where the political opportunism and media messaging (and tech's manipulation of what interests in the public) is more important than the actual information;  but for broad satire to work it has to feel a tad more credible to me.

On the downside:

*  I think there are two key problems - the first being that the screenplay seemed to bend over backwards to avoid the risk of characters being identified exactly with any living person or institution.   So, for example, the Trump-ian President is shown getting a hug from Bill Clinton in a photo - is that just there so the writer can say "see, I'm not saying she's necessarily a Republican"?   The tech billionaire - you got a sense he was designed to vaguely remind us of Steve Jobs, but a dumber version. (That guy's dead, so defamation wouldn't have been a problem if the character was more like him.  It would have upset Apple fanboys, however.)   We all know that the worst tech billionaire is probably Zuckerberg, but the character as written was not given any of his obvious features (in terms of age or terrible haircut), so it seems to me it was again "playing it safe".   And the terrible morning TV show - surely Fox News should be the target, but they took a fair amount of care to make it something more generic.  If I worked on one of the mainstream morning breakfast shows in the US, I would be a bit insulted by this aspect, actually.   

* The second problem - is it too much to ask of satire to be more scientifically accurate?    I think - without looking it up - that the chances of a comet being found to have valuable minerals is next to nil.  An asteroid - sure - but if the movie had gone with that, they wouldn't have had the ability to make the joke that the disaster was literally staring the idiot part of humanity in the face.   (Also, I suspect in real life, the comet would have been obvious in the sky earlier than it was in the film.)   I didn't care for the silliness of the plan to cut up the comet, either.   And really, very popular disaster films have made the public (and even media stars) aware of what the end of the world by giant meteor or asteroid strike would look like - it's just not really credible to have this news immediately downplayed on virtually any media network - even (dare I say it) Fox News.

I suspect that a more realistic scenario would have worked better as satire - say, that it was an asteroid, and that the problem turned out to be an ageing, libertarian inclined astronomer with Republican connections coming up with his own calculation that it was only a 50% chance of it hitting - not the 99% chance that NASA gave.  (Or he could calculate that it would hit the North Pole and not really endanger the planet - just some unfortunate Russian Northern cities that can be evacuated.)    And the President and her party runs with the contrarian advice...

It wouldn't be as broad a satire, but that would (in my opinion) be a good thing.

  

 

1950's science fiction

Google, via the Youtube algorithm, decided to get me looking at 1950's science fiction again, and so the other night I watched most of This Island Earth, of which I think I had only previously seen bits and pieces.

It is pretty deliciously silly, but it was in bright Technicolor and features an actor with the name "Rex Reason".   I fell asleep in the last third, but saw the "climax" (it's a film with a remarkable lack of dramatic arc) which features the crash of the good alien's spaceship into the ocean, and - cut to credits.   Lots of old science fiction had the really abrupt ending, I seem to recall.  Perhaps because they often ran with another feature, so it's not as if it's the only thing the audience came to see.

So today, Youtube decided I would like to watch Commando Cody - Sky Marshal of the Universe - not a movie but a serial of 12 episodes given I think both theatrical then TV release.  This guy:

 

He was the original rocketman character, and I have an early memory of getting a thrill from the flying suit sequences.   And you know, I still kind of like the way they did them - I think it must be a dummy flying along a wire line, or something, but you can't tell exactly how it was done.   (Have a look here, at the 3.50min mark to see the bits I am talking about.)  The print quality of this on Youtube is high, but as for story - the space villain is ridiculously Flash Gordon in design.     

Still, it's worth a laugh.  Just as in This Island Earth, there's a lot of nuclear science being done in tiny laboratories.  I guess the movie makers in the 1950s had much idea about the size of the Manhattan Projection.   

Some really bad looking movies

A few posts back, I noted a list of potentially interesting looking movies due for release in 2022.

I should balance that by noting how God-awful a couple of trailers for some forthcoming big budget movies look - the first being Moonfall, by "the End of the World is my only interest" schlock director Roland Emmerich.  As Ars Technica writes in its commentary on the trailer:

Hello, police? I'd like to report a murder—the sacrifice of credible science on the altar of entertainment,

The other really, really bad looking trailer is (unfortunately) featuring the very likeable Tom Holland, who apparently now does Spidernam level stunts even in movies in which he's not in that costume.  Look how silly this looks:

It's based on some well loved games which I had never heard of. Not sure that there is any good movie that's ever been created that way.

Some Biden commentary to agree with

Jonathan Freeland in The Guardian, on the very "The Trump menace", makes some commentary about Biden which rings true:

It’s worth recalling here how shaky the president’s position was from the start, seeking to govern with a diminished, razor-thin Democratic majority in the House and a 50-50 deadlocked Senate. Despite that, he has passed some major bills and made some big, even transformative moves. As the former speechwriter to George W Bush David Frum puts it: “In 11 months, Biden has done more with 50 Democratic senators than Barack Obama did with 57.”

And yet, it’s not enough. Biden passed a vital infrastructure bill, but his larger package of social spending and action on the climate crisis is stalled. His poll ratings took a hit with the speed of the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan after August’s chaotic US withdrawal. And his 4 July declaration that America could celebrate its “independence from Covid-19” now looks horribly premature.

You can make a strong case that none of these things is Biden’s fault. His spending bill is stalled thanks to two Democratic senators who simply refuse to get on board. (Given their politics, Biden probably deserves credit for getting them to back him as often as they have.) The withdrawal from Afghanistan was under a deal agreed by Trump; indeed, Trump’s exit would have come earlier. As for Covid, what could any president do when more than a quarter of the country – overwhelmingly Trump supporters – refuse to get vaccinated?

I would also add, that if teacher's unions are causing even Democrat voters to get angry over their refusal/reluctance to re-open schools, they have much more reason to be concerned about teacher's health in a country where a  high certain percentage of students will be denied access to vaccination by their un vaccinated parents, and with Delta still a threat.

 

Too stupid to engage with

Poor old JC - he never knew who to listen to on climate change, and while he still argues with racist idiots at the Catallaxy replacements, on the lost Trump election, he has adopted the super convenient line of the truly stupid:  "No, it's up to you to convince me that my suspicion is wrong.  And you can't!":

Yes, just incredible

 

COVID and churches

The Economist has an article up about something that had crossed my mind over the last couple of Covid years - how bad will it be for churches in terms of diminishing congregations who have become used to not having to attend services?:

And this:

...the streaming of services has made it easier for worshippers to “church hop”. In a poll of practising Christians in America in 2020 by Barna Group, which conducts worldwide research into religion, 14% had switched churches, 18% were attending more than one church, 35% were attending only their pre-pandemic church and 32% had stopped going to church altogether (see chart 2).

Certainly, the Right wing conservatives in the Catholic Church have been upset that Archbishops (and the Pope) went along with vaccinations and abiding by government restrictions on services at all; but I guess they will still be going along to whatever conservative parish they can find in any case.

Unexpected movie optimism

Actually, this BBC list of 22 movies to watch out for during 2022 contains a surprising number of potentially interesting ones to watch.   Let's hope Covid lifts enough to let us re-engage with going to the cinema whenever we want to.

Test secured

So, unless the Queensland government guidelines have changed in the last 30 minutes (always a possibility), it would seem that as a close contact of a positive Covid case I am supposed to take a RAT immediately even though I have no clear symptoms.   (I am now leaning towards the itch and kinda rash on my neck being an insect bite from a couple of nights ago -  after standing outside for 10 minutes waiting for the dog to finish pooping, I did feel something soft and squishy on that side of my face which I flung off.  A spider perhaps?  But it didn't feel like I was bitten at the time.  Odd.) 

In one of the few useful things Zuckerberg has achieved, apparently it was Facebook that alerted my nearby co-workers that a gym nearby was selling RATs and they rushed and acquired a pack of five, and delivered one to my home.  [Update - no the story of how the test was located is wrong - my co-worker had left their name at a pharmacy next to a gym, and maybe got notified this morning that they were in stock?  But they were not giving them out to people walking in off the street.  So Facebook remains a blight on humanity.]  

Interestingly, the guidelines say that a close contact is not allowed to leave home quarantine to buy a retail RAT - only to go to a testing centre.   I suppose they have to say that especially as the lack of RAT availability means people could be wandering around all day trying to find a shop with them in stock, but still, unless your lucky like me and was able to get one delivered home, this is a significant problem with reliance on home administered RATs.  Would be much easier if they were available at doctors or pharmacies for free and people needing them allowed to go by car to pick one up.   Now that I think of it, you could even allow for them to be handed to people in their cars.

I now have one in my hands.  Self administered nasal.  Ugh.

Will report back!

Update:  yay, negative.

Too early in the year for some democracy depression?

Here's a long, depressing take on the question of the future for American democracy at Vox:

How does this end?

Where the crisis in American democracy might be headed.

It all sounds very depressing, but there is one aspect I think the article doesn't seem to take into much account - the poisonous role of Murdoch, Fox News and the Right wing infotainment industry in creating and maintaining "pernicious polarisation", with the awful feedback loop it has built with the Republican Party.

What happens, I wonder, if Fox News has a major turnaround and becomes actually interested in not stoking Right wing doom-mongering and hatred?   Yeah, I know, fat chance:  and does it mean that its fan base just moves onto OAN instead?   And the fascist problems in other nations in the last 40 or so years happened without the same media influence.

But does the obvious role of the Right wing media in US politics mean that it is actually capable of healing partisan divisions if major figures (cough, Murdoch family) took it on as their role to do so?

I'm clutching at straws for optimism, so sue me.

I'm also struck by the tiny amount of time the article devotes to this issue, which I think is an obvious problem that Americans (or the British) just never seem to spend much time contemplating:

Even more fundamental reforms may be necessary. In his book Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop, political scientist Lee Drutman argues that America’s polarization problem is in large part a product of our two-party electoral system. Unlike elections in multiparty democracies, where leading parties often govern in coalition with others, two-party contests are all-or-nothing: Either your party wins outright or it loses. As a result, every vote takes on apocalyptic stakes.

A new draft paper by scholars Noam Gidron, James Adams, and Will Horne uncovers strong evidence for this idea. In a study of 19 Western democracies between 1996 and 2017, they find that ordinary partisans tend to express warmer feelings toward the party’s coalition partners — both during the coalition and for up to two decades following its end. 

“In the US, there’s simply no such mechanism,” Gidron told me. “Even if you have divided government, it’s not perceived as an opportunity to work together but rather to sabotage the other party’s agenda.”

Drutman argues for a combination of two reforms that could move us toward a more cooperative multiparty system: ranked-choice voting and multimember congressional districts in the House of Representatives.

Yes.   

Meanwhile, I continue to agree with David Roberts' outrage.  Some examples:

 

 

And someone else notes in the thread following, an observation that became clear to me years ago when reading Sinclair Davidson trying to run climate change denialism:

COVID at home?

We're presently waiting for the outcome of a COVID PCR test for my daughter, which only took a 6 hour line up from 6 am yesterday to get administered.

She's not super sick, but the friend she was out with (and at whose house she stayed at) on New Years is apparently feeling very ill and tested positive.  My daughter's symptoms:  a sore throat and headache mainly, and not too bad for the first couple of days, but somewhat worse this morning.   You can imagine how sensitised that is making me to every throat twinge or nose drip.  Or even itch and whether my neck glands are swollen.   I had forgotten how in the early days, there were lots of symptoms being associated with it.

So, of course, I am the type of person most keen to seen RATs actually available, and I find it hard to understand why no one knows when the stock is to be delivered.  I think the head of Chemist Warehouse on Monday night was predicting plenty of stock by the end of the week, baring transport difficulties.   But I noticed that Coles seems to be having trouble re-stocking even the stuff that is not the subject of panic buying - such as chips and nuts.  So I guess Omicron may well be taking out truck drivers.

Anyway, maybe we will know more by tomorrow.   Everyone else at home seems OK. 

Update: on the topic of COVID more generally, I find far down on the Guardian's website this interesting article:

Could microclots help explain the mystery of long Covid? 

Update 2:   Yes, daughter did get a positive PCR test for COVID, so now it's a case of de-ciphering the lengthy current rules for home quarantine for the rest of us.  Do we have enough food to last the period?  It actually might help encourage the using up of a ridiculous amount of frozen items we keep at home... 

Boring content not about Covid

Once, maybe twice, a year we get to eat off our Spode fancy schmancy dinnerware.  The ones with this pattern:

I must admit, I like how the busyness of the design encourages much staring and trying to work out what is going in the scene.

I'll crop for you:

We seem to have cows in the water, to the consternation of a man and woman (I think) on the shore.  But what's going with the figure on the right, sitting on a box, and behind what exactly?

Maybe a priest? Or woman?  Sitting behind what looks like a fake rock face, like what they would build for a film.  Or is it something my brain just hadn't made sense of yet?

In fact, a lot of the design looks a bit Escher-esque, no?  Like this:

I'm not sure all of those angles make sense.  And now that I think of it, it's perhaps a tad Dali-esque too. 

Anyway, maybe everyone else knows about this pattern, as it's more famous than I knew:

The Blue Italian design was launched by Josiah Spode II in 1816, and this decorative vignette provided the perfect showcase for his father’s revolutionary blue underglaze transfer printing process. It depicts a classic Italianate landscape – although the origins of the scene remain a mystery, as no single place in Italy seems to match the various elements.

And Country Life magazine explains what's going on:

And so it was that, when Blue Italian was launched in 1816, it couldn’t have met with a more eager audience. Its Imari Oriental border of exotic flowers and scrolls gave a nod to the industry’s history, but within dwelt a fairytale as pretty as a picture. The scene is the Italian countryside: a shepherd and his lady tend their flock by a river that meanders lazily past a picturesque ruin, two lovers hold hands on the riverbank and, beyond, the river curves dotingly around a tiny chapel towards a medieval castle on high.

Trees and flowers permeate the landscape, both earth and sky, as if Man and his soft-edged edifices are there merely by Nature’s benevolent wish, and clouds scud overhead, reminding us that blue and white come in so many beautiful hues.

The "lovers holding hands on the riverbank" certainly don't get much prominence. 

The details of the design seem obscure enough that you could probably make a stupid Da Vinci Code style story out of it - it's a map to a hidden treasure somewhere in Italy, with the involvement of the Church (I'm going with the figure sitting on the mystery box being an Italian-ate priest.)

You can thank me later, Hollywood.