Peanut-gallery commentator. Beware #COVID19 and #LongCovid. #CovidIsNotOver and #COVIDIsAirborne, so #WearAMask. #MasksWork #COVIDCautious
Joined August 2009
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"The Philippine stock market has spent the past decade as the worst performer among global benchmarks tracked by Bloomberg. The PSE’s answer isn’t another market rally.
It’s a fun run."
This is the type of institutional shitposting we need rn🤝
PSEi when Monzon took over: nearly 8,000.
PSEi now: 5,679.
Good news: the PSE finally has a Bull Run.
Bad news: it’s 21 kilometers around Makati.
bilyonaryo.com/longing-for-t…
randomsalt is living with (long) COVID 😷 retweeted
Sociologist Richard Sennett wrote a wonderful book about the value of hand craftsmanship in his 2008 book The Craftsman. He traces the long history of why people have valued handmade goods for hundreds of years, even through periods of major technological or industrial advancement, and weaves together an engaging intellectual history involving figures like Aristotle and John Ruskin.
One of the book’s recurring themes is the value of imperfection. Sennett notes that the authors of the Encyclopédie praised the “character” of handmade goods, such as the slightly irregular bubbles in hand-blown glass bottles. He connects this idea to Voltaire, who warned us of the relentless pursuit of perfection. If we learned to embrace these imperfections, Sennett suggests, perhaps we would develop more realistic expectations about life.
This creates an interesting tension at the heart of craftsmanship. A good craftsperson strives to make something as well as they possibly can, yet must ultimately accept that perfection is unattainable because they are imperfect, like all human creatures. Toward the end of the book, Sennett discusses craftsmanship in religious terms. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, he notes, excessive pride is a sin because it risks putting the self in God's place. In this sense, the craftsperson embodies both aspiration and humility.
In Sennett's framing, craftsmanship is not necessarily about whether a machine can replicate the results, but about a human's role in production and what that process can teach us about ourselves. It's not just about materiality, but also spirituality.
In this era of artificial intelligence, it is becoming urgent to distinguish human art from what machines produce. There is an ontological difference, even before an aesthetic one, between art and what a machine can generate through statistical calculation based on millions of images created by others. Algorithms lack the spark of humanity. For this reason, the Church wishes to renew an alliance with artists and cultural institutions to safeguard our humanity.
randomsalt is living with (long) COVID 😷 retweeted
In this era of artificial intelligence, it is becoming urgent to distinguish human art from what machines produce. There is an ontological difference, even before an aesthetic one, between art and what a machine can generate through statistical calculation based on millions of images created by others. Algorithms lack the spark of humanity. For this reason, the Church wishes to renew an alliance with artists and cultural institutions to safeguard our humanity.
randomsalt is living with (long) COVID 😷 retweeted
Clean air for the rich! Do they have OCD? Of course not, only middle class and lower class people who are airborne aware have OCD if they are still masking and using hepa filters to clean the air! When the rich do it, it’s something different. For them, their mitigations during
ALT Pure insanity The hot new luxury good for the rich: air. The wealthy have d different houses, different cars, different lifestyles from the rest of us. These days they also want to breathe different air. Shayla Love February 21, 2024 illustration by Abuja Shrestha
ALT The new republic take a casual scroll through luxury real estate listings today, and you’ll find that Charlotte of the Upper West side is not alone: many buildings are enticing buyers with the promise of an exceptional breathing experience. A $1.5 million apartment in Battery Park City boasts “twice filtered outdoor air”, while a Gramercy condo for $3.1 million notes that it has “filters in the common and amenity areas for premium and fresh air ventilation”. At Rose Hill in NoMad, where apartments range from $2 million to $6 million, air filters occupy every corner of the building, including common areas, and there are additional “parameter walls and floor slabs to thwart transmission of the air, odors and contaminants.” A 2023 roundup from City Realty listed more than a dozen current properties in New York.
randomsalt is living with (long) COVID 😷 retweeted
so many years in, i still don't know anything about crypto and don't understand how it works. but 30% of the time i see a stupid comment on here, the person has crypto in their bio and i admit this colors my view of the tech. it appears to be a community of stupid, annoying ppl
COVID may worsen existing health problems long-term, study suggests
Nearly a third of respondents reported a worsening respiratory condition, including asthma, COPD, cough, and shortness of breath.
Read more: bit.ly/3TRmQPn
ALT Exhausted woman sitting on the edge of a bed
randomsalt is living with (long) COVID 😷 retweeted
Reminder, waves are not "getting smaller." If you glance at long-term trends, that may seem the case, but the past few years, waves are actually just getting more platykurtic (wider, less pointy). Transmission is only relatively lower since December. Details below.
This is a special graph we only post periodically. It shows 2 things that have considerable implications.
1) Transmission has been lower than anticipated since December, and *only* since December. It's a recent phenomenon, not a long-term trend. WastewaterSCAN has poor longitudinal standardization so sometimes people mistakenly believe waves are getting smaller and smaller (or they say this because their listserv subscribers like to hear it). CDC and Biobot make very long-term data difficult to find. On the PMC 13-wave graph (which integrates long-term CDC and Biobot data, some of which is measured weekly by hand!), wave height gets smaller, but the waves are wider (hard to perceive visually). The take-home is we're in a very weird place in the pandemic, not a trend, but either an aberration or shift.
2) Cumulative levels for the current year (Y7) closely resemble that of Year 2. This is where the debate of aberration vs shift gets interesting. If we are in an aberration of lower than typical transmission, that means many people are walking around with limited short-term infection-derived immunity, and most people are not recently boosted. That would be a tinder box for a saltation variant (MANY variants are circulating), and put us on that scary Y2 path. The alternative is that this is not an aberration but a more meaningful shift, some population-level immunity building through a combination of boosters, infection history, and the most vulnerable dying (social murder), meaning time between infection starting to increase. These divergent hypotheses are the difference between 150 million vs 325 million infections for Y7. If I were a gambler, I'd bet about 200 million. However, you can see the uncertainty. This is a time like no other to monitor the data closely.
The good news is that wastewater monitoring is not going away. PMC will keep posting. Retired NASA scientist, Dr. Eastman at WHN (@jlerollblues), is close to having localized *forecasts* too. On Instagram, a new entrant is integrating different data sources with other methodologies. @CyFi10, @amethystarlight, and @CovidDataReport post nuanced updates frequently.
My advice would be to talk to the people who will listen and remember that much more important than understanding the risk is knowing you can do something about it. Boosting is the easiest intervention. If someone will mask, teach them how to properly fit their nose wire and do a seal check, get them to upgrade from a KN95 with cheek and chin gaps to an N95 like 3M Aura or 3M VFlex in the riskiest or socially easiest contexts. Easier said than done, but if that pessimistic scenario plays out, they may be ready to listen.
ALT Within-year cumulative infection graph
randomsalt is living with (long) COVID 😷 retweeted
You've probably seen the news that the @CDCgov is understaffed and also in the midst of contractor issues. We're watching closely for any CDC data errors. There are a few. The errors are not nefarious, and I wanted you to know we're tracking them closely so you continue to have confidence in our interpretation of the underlying data.
This week, we spotted what appear to be four major data entry errors in the CDC data. One is for the Big Island of Hawai'i and the other 3 are in Kentucky. The wastewater value (WVAL) is a relatively arbitrary scale, but usually it peaks around 15 for a large wave, and 30 for a surge. You could definitely see something higher (perhaps 100-200) if there were a weather-related aberration or some other obscure reason; the issue would be exacerbated if only a small population covered.
However, these are ridiculously large values. There's probably a mistake in someone's code or a manual data entry error. Maybe someone's dog jumped on the keyboard. Each site measures wastewater on arbitrary scales, using arbitrary metrics, and the CDC basically has to translate them all into a unified language. It could be an issue at the reporting site or the CDC (the CDC should catch this, regardless). Also, when sites are transitioning contractors or methodologies, they track data both ways for a time period to calibrate, and then flip to the new contractor or system. It's possible something is being labeled as one contractor or methodology but should have been the other. Imagine if one company tracked levels per mL and another tracked per L, for example. It would make the levels appear 1000x higher if unrecognized. Hopefully the issues get fixed soon.
On the Big Island, I don't think it's a big deal, as it's a mistake of claiming Very High is actually some higher version of Very High, and levels have been quite elevated across the state for some time. In Kentucky, there's a reasonable chance that parts of northern Kentucky are actually having a little lower transmission than they appear, but it's uncertain. We've capped the WVAL at a max of 60 for the time being and added a >60 warning for counties where that is an issue. This seemed a better solutional than just hiding the data from people. We'll consider these sorts of issues if/when they pop up again, but this seems to be an atypical and hopefully one-off problem.
By the way, not everything at the CDC is #Bluewashing. Sometimes errors are just errors, and sometimes those errors are in the high direction. We will always try to catch any issue. More and more citizens are doing great work with wastewater data, so it's helpful to note these issues so everyone knows to keep an eye out for them.
ALT Example graph, likely impossibly high value
ALT Example graph, definitely impossibly high value
ALT Example graph, definitely impossibly high value
ALT Example graph, definitely impossibly high value
randomsalt is living with (long) COVID 😷 retweeted
"for many millions of people around the world, their COVID-19 experience continues as they live with the health consequences of long COVID, manifesting as an array of protracted and debilitating symptoms that disrupt work, relationships, and daily life.
Long COVID remains poorly understood, poorly defined, and poorly treated, with many patients feeling forgotten and isolated by society and the health care system.
In this episode of Healthy Dialogue, we spoke with E. Wesley Ely, MD, MPH, professor of medicine at Vanderbilt University..
We discussed what it is, why it has been so difficult to define, and what it will take to better care for the people affected by it."
Please listen to this dialogue unless you are fatigued.
'Long COVID: The problem society wants to forget - A healthy dialogue with E. Wesley Ely'
jamanetwork.com/journals/jam…
randomsalt is living with (long) COVID 😷 retweeted
I am rarely affected by discourse on this platform, but the current wave of posts asserting that Long Covid is psychosomatic has angered me. To be very clear: if you're asserting that LC isn't a physical disease, you're ignorant of science. End of.
randomsalt is living with (long) COVID 😷 retweeted
BY FAR the left’s biggest failure on COVID was failing to advocate for PUBLIC solutions. Imagine what a national coalition of socialists, unions, & disability advocates could’ve accomplished on indoor air quality standards, workers comp, sick leave, health care, research, etc
randomsalt is living with (long) COVID 😷 retweeted
Virus-induced brain inflammation in CHILDREN after Covid - I‘m sure it’s totally mild.
Stop sacrificing children!
#AvoidSARS2
Multimodal MRI: COVID19 effects on pediatric brain: alterations in cortical metrics, structural covariance networks (SCNs) based on Local Gyrification Index (LGI) in children with mild COVID19,with changes in non-invasive MRI proxies- glymphatic function. nature.com/articles/s41598-0…
randomsalt is living with (long) COVID 😷 retweeted
yes the Cornell rape incident is horrible, but a more overlooked sinister detail is that they advertised it in a group chat and NONE of the guys reported it or stopped them. Men enable men.
randomsalt is living with (long) COVID 😷 retweeted
Most people won't admit or even consider that they have Long COVID. Instead they just have mystery health problems that are only mysterious if we ignore thousands of studies and pretend that COVID isn't a vascular disease that everyone keeps getting reinfected with.
ALT Google trends showing interest over time for Long COVID and it shows a spike in 2020, peaking December 2021 to 100 and then after that dropping way down to a negligible amount of interest, despite the fact that millions of people have been getting it.
ALT Long COVID has not disappeared. People continue to develop the condition after new COVID infections. World Health Organization European Region
randomsalt is living with (long) COVID 😷 retweeted
I could watch this all day on loop. BBC net zero moron getting owned by Guyana president.
randomsalt is living with (long) COVID 😷 retweeted
Articles and studies detailing the long lasting after effects of covid infections have been published in:
Nature Medicine, The Lancet, The Lancet Infectious Diseases, The Lancet Respiratory Medicine, The Lancet Psychiatry, The Lancet Neurology, The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health, The Lancet Healthy Longevity, The New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, JAMA Internal Medicine, JAMA Neurology, JAMA Psychiatry, JAMA Pediatrics, JAMA Cardiology, JAMA Network Open, BMJ, BMJ Medicine, Annals of Internal Medicine, PLOS Medicine, eClinicalMedicine, eBioMedicine, Science, Science Translational Medicine, Science Advances, Cell, Cell Host & Microbe, Immunity, Nature, Nature Communications, Nature Neuroscience, Nature Cardiovascular Research, Nature Immunology, Nature Aging, Nature Mental Health, Nature Microbiology, European Heart Journal, Circulation, Circulation Research, Journal of the American College of Cardiology, European Respiratory Journal, American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, Thorax, Brain, Neurology, Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery & Psychiatry, Alzheimer's & Dementia, Kidney International, Journal of the American Society of Nephrology, Clinical Infectious Diseases, Journal of Infectious Diseases, Emerging Infectious Diseases, Clinical Microbiology and Infection, Diabetes Care, Gut, Gastroenterology, Blood, Arthritis & Rheumatology, Rheumatology, Pediatrics, Pediatric Research, Obstetrics & Gynecology, British Journal of Sports Medicine, Journal of Clinical Investigation, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and Scientific Reports.
This is not quackery.
It's not low quality.
It's not junk science.
It's not debated.
It's detailed, exhaustive, thoroughly researched science:
Covid infections increase your risk of a vast range of health problems.
Vaccinations do not prevent that increase in risk.
Having had Covid before does not prevent that increase in risk.
The only thing that prevents the increase in risk is to *not catch Covid*.
There's a wave now, so mask up.
randomsalt is living with (long) COVID 😷 retweeted
"Negligence was institutionalized" is a phrase that so perfectly sums it all up.
My life changed forever because someone gave my 89 year old dad with late stage Parkinson's covid while waiting in the hospital for LTC. I caught it from him because we had to swap out to a...
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