Post a Lot of Things World
The news this week has me tremendously stressed. Russia is attempting to conquer a country the US (and of course the Russians themselves, not to neglect that aspect) guaranteed security in exchange for giving up possession of Soviet nuclear weapons. This is a humanitarian crisis and a great crime in its immediate consequences, but it's also the end of the current post-Soviet order, maybe post-WWII-order. The paradox of mutually assured destruction seems to be that the more certain the thread of mutual destruction is to deter crossing some specific clear line, the more irrelevant it is to deterring anything before that point. (If it turns out later that the exact location of the line is actually ambiguous, that's even worse.)
Texas is threatening to split up families as part of a monstrous attempt to disappear trans children. Paul Farmer, the founder of Partners in Health who worked tirelessly to help some of the world's poorest people, died suddenly at the age of 62.
The CDC today changed their mask guidelines, moving the emphasis further from containing COVID and limiting the suggestion for indoor mask mandates to the highest of three categories. Cambridge mask mandate is scheduled to end March 12. Somerville's is set to be reconsidered starting March 3 if test positive rate is lower than 1%, but it has not gotten that low yet (and has been moving up a hair).
I wish I had a better idea of the properties of the omicron BA.2 subvariant (given my assumption that we didn't get that one).
It seems like we're heading into the world where lots of people get COVID every year, and it's "only" about twice as bad as the flu in terms of immediate consequences. Except that's really horrifically bad for quite a lot of people, and we don't yet know the long-term consequences of COVID infection in general and repeated reinfection in particular, given that COVID seems to sometimes cause long-term neurological and cardiovascular damage.
Texas is threatening to split up families as part of a monstrous attempt to disappear trans children. Paul Farmer, the founder of Partners in Health who worked tirelessly to help some of the world's poorest people, died suddenly at the age of 62.
The CDC today changed their mask guidelines, moving the emphasis further from containing COVID and limiting the suggestion for indoor mask mandates to the highest of three categories. Cambridge mask mandate is scheduled to end March 12. Somerville's is set to be reconsidered starting March 3 if test positive rate is lower than 1%, but it has not gotten that low yet (and has been moving up a hair).
I wish I had a better idea of the properties of the omicron BA.2 subvariant (given my assumption that we didn't get that one).
It seems like we're heading into the world where lots of people get COVID every year, and it's "only" about twice as bad as the flu in terms of immediate consequences. Except that's really horrifically bad for quite a lot of people, and we don't yet know the long-term consequences of COVID infection in general and repeated reinfection in particular, given that COVID seems to sometimes cause long-term neurological and cardiovascular damage.