Introducing slow streets

One of the results of the lockdowns is the greatly reduced traffic on the streets. This has resulted in huge reductions in smog levels in cities that used to be plagued with poor air quality. But it has also resulted in some drivers taking advantage to speed. Some cities are now going further and shutting down traffic entirely on some streets, except for pedestrians and cyclists.

One such effort is in the city of Oakland, California that has shut down 74 miles of city streets, labeling them ‘slow streets’, to enable residents to use them to get outdoors and exercise while maintaining the appropriate distance from others and avoiding congesting the city’s parks and other recreational areas. The road will still be open to residents who live there.
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The great toilet paper shortage explained

I have mentioned before my puzzlement as to the run on toilet paper, where people seemed to be buying much more than they needed so that the stores ran out of them. It was put down to irrational hoarding and there were plenty of jokes made about this phenomenon. I even came across Freudian explanations, saying that the control of one’s bowels is a major achievement for little children that they are proud of, and loss of toilet paper was associated with loss of that control in people’s subconscious, which was why they did not want to risk any chance at all of running out.
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Dealing with addictions during lockdowns

My post earlier today about coffee and caffeine addiction made me think later about other addictions and how they are being handled during the lockdowns. For example, alcohol is a common addiction and while some states have declared alcohol stores to be essential services and thus allowed to be open, others have not exempted them from the lockdown. While it might be amusing to joke about alcohol being essential to getting through the boredom of staying at home, there is a more serious side, because closing the stores leaves addicts in those states desperate.

Someone I know is a physician in a state that did not exempt alcohol stores from the lockdown and he said that they have seen a influx of addicts coming to the emergency rooms because of severe withdrawal symptoms. Since they need the emergency room capacity to deal with the coronavirus cases, the addicts have been turned away untreated. While support groups for alcoholics have shifted, like so much else, to the online mode, they have their problems and may not be enough for some people trying to be sober.

That made me think about people who are addicted to harder, illegal drugs, who may have even more severe withdrawal symptoms. What will happen to them? Are their dealers still in business? Are the addicts still going out just to get their drugs? Addiction can make people do desperate things.

Coffee and caffeine and addiction

A have drunk coffee and tea all my life from the time even before I reached my teens. Nowadays I drink one cup of coffee in the morning and one cup of tea in the afternoon. That is not a lot but I am a caffeine addict in the sense that I look forward to a cup of coffee in the morning and feel somewhat uneasy if I don’t get one. I will even drink coffee that I know will taste bad just in order to get that morning caffeine fix. Is that addiction something to be concerned about?

In this transcript of a Fresh Air interview with food writer Michael Pollan about his new book that looks at how caffeine affects the daily rhythms of our lives, he quotes a researcher on addictions who says that that word is very leaded with negative connotations and that all addictions are not equal and some are harmless.
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Understanding the Covid-19 virus

I found this article in the April 13, 2020 issue of The New Yorker to be very informative about why fighting viruses is so much harder than fighting bacterial infections, especially those viruses like Covid-19 with a genome of RNA, because they evolve faster than those with DNA.

Furthermore while we have antibiotics that are effective against a whole array of bacterial infections, viruses require specialized, highly targeted treatments and we do not have them for most viruses. What is most effective against viruses are vaccines to prevent the onset of the disease. At the moment we do not have an antiviral drug effective against Covid-19 nor do we have a vaccine. Since these viruses also mutate easily, a treatment and vaccine that is developed for one may not work against the next virus that comes along. This is the same problem faced with flu vaccines, where they cannot be sure what type of virus will emerge the next year.
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Let the grifting begin!

The US has started pumping money into the system, with Congress passing a $2 trillion stimulus package and the Federal Reserve also pumping another $2.3 trillion into the economy. Naturally this has caught the attention of those who are eager to grab some of it to enrich themselves. This is why Congress has tried to create oversight committees to try and ensure that the money is used as intended.

But Donald Trump is a grifter whose family and circle of close associates are also grifters. So it is alarming but not surprising that he has started firing inspectors general, the watchdogs whose job it is to monitor the workings of institutions. One of those fired is the head of the coronavirus bailout oversight board.
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The coronavirus will create many natural experiments

There are many theories about society and human behavior that cannot be experimentally tested because of ethical reasons or impracticality. On occasion, there will occur conditions that allow for what are called natural experiments, where social conditions or governmental actions create situations that are suitable for large scale experimental studies that could not have been created by the researchers.

One such case I recall is where a state did not have the funds to expand Medicaid health insurance to everyone in the state who qualified so that they doled it out randomly. This enabled researchers later to study what benefits, if any, access to heath insurance provided, since they now had a large scale test group and a control group. I recall another study that looked into whether raising taxes encouraged people to move to a lower tax state, something rich people often threaten to do when their state is thinking of raising taxes. Researchers were able to study this when one state raised its taxes. They studied a large metropolitan area that was very close to that state’s boundary with a lower tax state to see if people moved a short distance to avoid paying the taxes.
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Fiasco!

We all need a good laugh from time to time especially during grim periods like this and I cannot recommend highly enough this hilarious episode from the radio show This American Life about fiascos, when things go so epically wrong that you have no choice but to laugh.

I have heard this episode twice and the first two parts especially, consisting of the prologue and Act I about an amateur stage production of Peter Pan, cracked me up each time.

Enjoy!