Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

Wenar from King's College, London to Stanford

The political philosopher Leif Wenar, currently at King's College, London, has accepted a senior offer from the Department of Philosophy at Stanford University, where he will start this fall.

(Thanks to Bob Talisse for the pointer.)

At least 30 million Americans out of work in the last six weeks

The last time I looked, the active labor force had about 160 million people in it--so we're approaching 20% (probably exceeded it, since unemployment claims trail job losses).   If a lot of them don't get put back to work, we will have a social and political catastrophe on our hands by mid-summer.

Typepad (the blog service provider) was down this morning...

...which is why you would have gotten an error message earlier.  It seems to be fixed!

Recovered patients who allegedly got reinfected?

They weren't, they were false positives, as suspected originally. 

(Thanks to Eric Winsberg for the pointer.)

Thoreau's revenge on literature professors during the pandemic

This is funny; an excerpt:

A few months ago, you were talking smack about my year in a cabin. Now you’re trapped in your condo in Yonkers or the backside of Amherst or wherever, and you’d trade it in a heartbeat for 150 square feet and a whole forest full of owls and frogs and shit....

Every damn fall, you tell your first-year Am Lit seminar that I’m completely full of shit. You stand there in your goddamned tweed jacket with the suede elbow patches, and tell the kids how my experiment in self-reliance was all just a sham. Then you angle your head just so, and say something snarky about “performative solitude” or “cabin porn.” And for the coup de grâce, you proclaim that I was never really alone at Walden Pond, because I had regular visitors.

Bitch, I disclosed my visitors — I wrote a whole damned chapter called “Visitors.” Can’t blame me if some debutante from Darien didn’t read it. And who’s entertaining visitors now? Not your quarantined ass.

"Statement of Academic Solidarity"

This petition has been making the rounds, and has been signed by a number of philosophers and other scholars whom I respect (it's also been signed by some hypocrites, mindless ideologues, and clowns, but that's OK! [amusingly, Avital Ronell, Ms. Solidarity with graduate students, signed]).  I encourage readers to take a look.  Here's the core of the statement:

In recognition of the profound disruptions to faculty’s personal lives, their research, and their teaching, hundreds of U.S. universities have offered year-long extensions of the tenure clock to assistant professors. This is a welcome and indeed unprecedented step. But its uneven application across academic ranks is inequitable and unfair.

Without extending the same measures to non-tenure track (NTT) faculty and to graduate workers, universities leave unprotected the most precarious academics, including those who shoulder the greatest teaching burden. NTT faculty and graduate workers are facing the same challenges as tenure-track faculty: adapting to remote teaching, massively increased caretaking responsibilities, lack of access to libraries, labs, and archives, and the forgoing of professional opportunities. They are also faced with an anemic job market that will only get worse as universities announce hiring freezes for the coming years.

The effects are predictable. The gulf between secure and precarious academics will deepen; countless promising academic careers will prematurely end, depriving the world of knowledge they would have produced. Thousands of scholars and their families will be stripped of economic security just as they need it most. Without employment, NTT faculty and graduate teachers will not have healthcare in the midst of this devastating pandemic....

We therefore call on all universities that have offered extensions of the tenure clock to include all academic workers employed for fixed terms in this extension—and regardless of institutional position on the “employee status” of graduate students. Whether it is the “guaranteed” package of funded years for graduate employees or the capped terms of lecturers and preceptors, all academic workers deserve the relief of knowing that they have job security  and the opportunity to complete their projects in more favorable conditions....

We, the undersigned, will not accept invitations for speaking engagements, workshops, and conferences at named institutions [that do not extend these measures to NTT faculty and graduate students]. By signing we commit to observing this policy for the 2020-2021 academic year. We will reassess pending future developments.

A couple of observations:

(1)  A threat to decline "speaking engagements, workshops, and conferences" during 2020-21 is a rather idle threat, given that there are unlikely to be many of these.  Why not a serious threat:  decline invitations for the next five years, decline to do tenure and promotion and departmental reviews for the next five years, etc.?   I think I know the answer.

(2)  Assuming there are such engagements, whether live or via Zoom, the threat will end up being carried out primarily against schools with fewer resources, since those schools will not have the financial resources to commit to the benefits proposed.

New clinical trial reports good results for anti-viral remdesivir

The news to date has been mixed, but this major study is hopeful:

A government-run study of Gilead’s remdesivir, perhaps the most closely watched experimental drug to treat the novel coronavirus, showed that the medicine is effective against Covid-19, the disease caused by the virus....

During an appearance alongside President Trump in the Oval Office, Anthony Fauci, the director of NIAID, said the data are a “very important proof of concept” and that there was reason for optimism, but cautioned the data were not a “knockout"....

The study compared remdesivir to placebo in 800 patients, with neither patients nor physicians knowing who got the drug instead of a placebo, meaning that unconscious biases will not affect the conclusions.

The main goal of the study is the time until patients improve, with different measures of improvement depending on how sick they were to begin with. While the result means that the drug helps patients improve faster, it is not possible to say how dramatic those improvements are.

Why are any colleges considering postponing their start date until January 2021?

This idea has cropped up in various places, but I can't understand the rationale:  barring some medical miracle, we will be back in lockdown by January 2021 as another wave of COVID comes crashing across the population.  Even the CDC has noted that the combination of COVID and flu next winter will make for a worse situation than we have now.  The best hope for colleges is to try to get as much of a term in as possible before flu season starts in the later fall, especially since many (but not all) states will likely see sharp declines in infection and disease by August.

Does anyone have an idea what lies behind the January 2021 starting date talk?  I'm perplexed.

Richard Marshall interviews Jonathan Quong (USC)...

...at 3:16 AM.

A good milestone in New York City

1,849 new confirmed cases today, the first time there have been fewer than 2,000 new cases in NYC since March 19.  (Details for NYC and Chicago here.  Chicago is currently at what appears to be its peak, and the good news is hospitals are not overwhelmed, and the planned 3,000-bed field hospital at a convention center downtown has been reduced to 1,000 beds.)

Distribution of jobs by area in 2019-20

Philosopher Marcus Arvan (Tampa) has again compiled the data on the job market.  I'll repost just one data point, the number of tenure-track jobs, with the distribution of jobs by area of specialty (AOS):

Junior-level TT jobs advertised = 224

• Value Theory = 76.8 jobs (34.3%)
• Open: 46 jobs (20.5%)
• History: 27.5 jobs (12.3%)
• Science (including cog. sci) = 24.5 jobs (10.9%)
• Core (mind, language, metaphysics, epistemology, logic) = 18.5 jobs (8.3%)
• Social identity (race, gender, feminism, disability, etc.) = 11.7 jobs (5.2%)
• Non-western: 11.6 jobs (5.2%)
• Continental: 7.75 jobs (3.5%)
• Religion: 1.25 jobs (0.6%)

As in prior years, we continue to see the decline of the analytic "core" areas (although some "open" jobs and some "social identity" jobs may go to folks in the "core").  Despite the foolish claim that philosophy departments in the U.S. are departments of "Western" philosophy, two centuries worth of Western philosophy (under the heading "Continental") account for just 3.5% of the the advertised positions, while non-Western philosophy jobs make up 5.2%.

It would be interesting to know the AOS of those who got the "open" jobs; if anyone compiles that data, please let me know.

Communicating with college students about COVID-19 risks

This is a useful document-- Download Coronavirus (COVID-19) Communicating Risks to College Students BRCT (1)--prepared by Dr. Erik Rifkin (an environmental scientist specializing in human health and ecological risks) and Dr. Andrew Lazris (a primary care physician).  (The document is also available on their website.)  An excerpt:

CDC data, as of April 24^th , shows a total of 22 young adults age 15-24 died of COVID-19 in the US. The CDC does not supply accurate data on how many people in this age group test positive, but we can use other data to estimate that number.*  We know through studies and observations in such places as enclosed Navy ships that about 60% of younger people are either asymptomatic and many more have minimal symptoms, and thus most young people even with COVID-19 would likely not pursue testing.  Hence, our conservative calculations of disease incidence in young adults likely over-estimate the death rate.

It should be noted that during this year, while 22 young adults in this age group died of COVID-19, 39 died from influenza and 120 died of pneumonia both unrelated to COVID-19.  Among children less than 18, 3 died of COVID-19 and 78 from Influenza, showing that the likelihood of death from COVID-19 is minimal at younger ages, even below that of influenza....

It is also illustrative to compare this year’s flu and COVID-19 death rates to that of an infection that occurred only three years ago and was lethal to young adults - the 2017 influenza outbreak. During that flu season, ~ 60,000 Americans died of influenza. In the age group, 18-49 (some of whom were college students, although it is difficult to know how many), 80,000 people were hospitalized and 3,000 people died; in younger kids, age 5-17, 20,000 were hospitalized and 528 died.  The absolute death rate from the 2017 influenza outbreak far exceeded that of COVID-19 in young kids and adults.  An estimate of the total influenza deaths in age group 15-24 using the same methods as we used in the COVID-19 calculation would be 783 deaths in the year 2017 from influenza, far higher than the number of deaths from either COVID-19 (22) or influenza (39) this year.

One complicating factor, of course, is that since colleges shut down in March (and they don't shut down for influenza in other years), we don't know how colleges being open during peak transmission time would change these figures.  But it is still useful to have a comparison between COVID and influenza for the college-age populations.

(Thanks to the historian Anthony Grafton [Princeton] for forwarding this document to me, and to Drs. Rifkin and Lazris for permission to share it.)

More hopeful vaccine news...

...from researchers at Oxford University.

Trump Library

A list of college plans for the fall

Courtesy of CHE (and it includes links to the sources).

(Thanks to Dr. David Ozonoff for the pointer.)

Philosopher Cheryl Misak's biography of Ramsey informatively reviewed...

...by Anthony Gottlieb at The New Yorker.

More on blood pressure meds and COVID-19: some good news

Here; briefly:  "The report from one hospital in Wuhan found that among patients with hypertension hospitalized with the COVID-19 virus, there was no difference in disease severity or death rate in patients taking ACE inhibitors or ARBs and those not taking such medications."  There's further detail at the link.

(Thanks to Dr. David Ozonoff for the pointer.)

How does the coronavirus kill its victims?

There are a lot of routes, but damage to the lungs, heart, and/or kidneys seem to loom largest.

A case for optimism about a vaccine

I ran this piece by some folks with relevant science training, and they think it's plausible if optimistic; a couple of interesting points:

It will probably take at least 18 months, but the biopharmaceutical industry will surmount the technical challenges to create a vaccine for Covid-19. Some think that’s not possible, since we haven’t created vaccines to the four human coronaviruses that regularly cause common colds. This is a misconception.

The lack of a vaccine against those viruses is hardly because of technical challenges. We can make a vaccine against a coronavirus—we’ve even got several for chickens. The reasons we don’t vaccinate against human coronaviruses explain a lot about the economics of clinical development and the way we think about drugs, vaccines, and risk as patients. They also illuminate why drug companies seem to respond to certain therapeutic challenges, while ignoring others.

Our four standard human coronaviruses cause only 20 percent of colds. The other 80 percent are mostly caused by rhinoviruses, respiratory syncytial virus, parainfluenza virus (not the same as influenza), and other viruses we haven’t even identified yet. They are all so different that each would require a different vaccine. So while we could have made a coronavirus vaccine (which might have had to be four vaccines, one for each strain), the trouble is that it would have helped protect against only 20 percent of the viruses that cause colds.

President of Brown's proposal for how colleges can open in the fall

Sensible enough, and echoes some ideas seen in the Purdue plan and in thoughts I posted about this awhile ago.  An excerpt:

All campuses must be able to conduct rapid testing for the coronavirus for all students, when they first arrive on campus and at regular intervals throughout the year. Testing only those with symptoms will not be sufficient. We now know that many people who have the disease are asymptomatic. Regular testing is the only way to prevent the disease from spreading silently through dormitories and classrooms.

Traditional contact tracing is not sufficient on a college campus, where students may not know who they sat next to in a lecture or attended a party with. Digital technology can help. Several states are working to adapt mobile apps created by private companies to trace the spread of disease, and colleges and universities can play a role by collaborating with their state health departments and rolling out tracing technology on their campuses.

Testing and tracing will be useful only if students who are ill or who have been exposed to the virus can be separated from others. Traditional dormitories with shared bedrooms and bathrooms are not adequate. Setting aside appropriate spaces for isolation and quarantine (e.g. hotel rooms) may be costly, but necessary. It will also be necessary to ensure that students abide by the rigorous requirements of isolation and quarantine.

It's an open question, of course, whether enough testing will be available come late summer--I would imagine every university hoping to open is in the process of trying to secure tests, as well as masks, hand sanitizer, and the like.   Schools in college towns won't have adequate hotel space to draw on, so they may need to create dorms for those who are sick (to that end, schools ought to be granting some number of deferrals to create space on campus).   Unmentioned, but essential it seems to me, are mandatory flu shots, so that colleges aren't dealing with two infectious outbreaks at once.  All of this will also be costly, and some schools won't be able to bear the cost, so will revert to on-line instruction.  

Feel free to link to other plans colleges are making (and see some of those noted here and in the comments).

(Thanks to Jonathan Kramnick for the pointer.)

ADDENDUM:  One thing the Brown President also does not mention, but which seems to me crucial, is to start earlier in August so as to conclude the fall term before Thanksgiving.  I can't imagine anything more counter-productive then shipping thousands of students to homes around the country for af ew days, then bringing them back to campus for a couple of more weeks!  It will be hard enough to do all the testing etc. for the start of the Winter/Spring term, colleges really should plan on ending by Thanksgiving, even if that means losing a week of instruction.

Maryland's plan for recovery and reopening

This is probably illustrative of what states not led by morons will do.  Note especially the Low, Medium, and High Risk activities at pp. 25-29.   The Low Risk activities won't get going until the state has had roughly two weeks of declining case loads--so maybe late May?   I don't think Maryland will get to the High Risk activities anytime in the next year.   The plan continues to emphasize telework where that is possible.  And note that the plan candidly acknowledges a possible need to close down again.  I think this is probably more indicative of what the next year will look like, although Georgia is now running a natural experiment with its population, the outcome of which may indeed influence what other governors do.  But I strongly suspect Maryland will be more indicative of the prudent approach.

Great moments in obscure rock 'n' roll: Captain Beyond, "Dancing Madly Backwards," 1972

California band, made up of former members of Deep Purple and Iron Butterfly, among others, they are sometimes described as a proto-"stoner rock" band.  This is from their debut album:

 

How widesperad has exposure to the new coronavirus been?

We noted the recent antibody studies out of California.   A study in Miami finds that 6% of the population has antibodies, while a study in New York found that 21% of people in New York City had antibodies, while 3.6% in upstate New York had been exposed.   What should we make of these findings?  Here's a few observations, more welcome in the comments.

(1)  The infection fatality ratio is lower than the confirmed case fatality ratio--it looks to be well under 1%.  That's somewhat hopeful, although I confess if the odds of dying from this are still 1 in 500, rather than 1 in 100, that's still a bet I'd rather not take.   (One problem in being more precise is that while we've known that confirmed cases are undercounting, we also know that not all the deaths are being counted either.)

(2)  "Herd immunity" requires at least 60% of the population (and maybe 80%) to have immunity, so we're very far from herd immunity, even in a hotspot like New York City.

(3)  We don't actually know if the antibodies confer immunity, or, if they do, for how long.  There's reason to hope that they confer some immunity for some period of time--recall this earlier post.  But that's just a (reasonable) hope at this stage.

(4)  It is good news that the vast, vast majority of people exposed to the virus don't get sick enough (if they get sick at all) to require hospitalization, where they would be more likely to join the list of "confirmed" cases (which, again, we know has been undercounting the total amount of infections out there).   Despite that, the strain on the healthcare system has been dramatic, and of course would have been catastrophic had no steps been taken to slow the spread.

A guy from Brooklyn explains to the government what needs to be done

This is how I talk, so God bless him (and fuck "the greedy cocksuckers"!):

And it's getting close to class consciousness!

 

Houlgate on Brandom on Hegel

I agree with Professor Houlgate's verdict (if not all his reasons for it):

The result is a rich study of the issues that are of enduring interest to [Brandom] and that he takes to be at the core of Hegel's Phenomenology....[T]he book, in my view, sets out Brandom's ideas rather than Hegel's, so if readers know little about the latter, they will not be at a serious disadvantage. Brandom claims to offer a legitimate interpretation of Hegel's Phenomenology and indeed to have developed his ideas about cognition and action partly through studying and teaching Hegel's great text. To my mind, however, many of the theses Brandom attributes to Hegel find their source in Wittgenstein, Sellars and Rorty -- or in Brandom himself -- rather than in Hegel. There are certainly points of overlap between Brandom's thought and Hegel's; but Brandom seems to me not always, and in somes cases not at all, to do justice to Hegel's core insights in the Phenomenology (and elsewhere in his philosophy).

What is it like to be a philosopher? Spencer Case edition

Here.

Some modest vaccine progress in China

Hopeful news, but still early days:

For the first time, one of the many COVID-19 vaccines in development has protected an animal, rhesus macaques, from infection by the new coronavirus, scientists report. The vaccine, an old-fashioned formulation consisting of a chemically inactivated version of the virus, produced no obvious side effects in the monkeys, and human trials began on 16 April.

Researchers from Sinovac Biotech, a privately held Beijing-based company, gave two different doses of their COVID-19 vaccine to a total of eight rhesus macaque monkeys. Three weeks later, the group introduced SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, into the monkeys’ lungs through tubes down their tracheas, and none developed a full-blown infection.

"I like it,” says Florian Krammer, a virologist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai who has co-authored a status report about the many different COVID-19 vaccines in development. “This is old school but it might work. What I like most is that many vaccine producers, also in lower–middle-income countries, could make such a vaccine.

Modeling, policy, and COVID-19

Philosophers John Symons (Kansas) and Eric Winsberg (South Florida) talk with Daniel Kaufman (Missouri State).

Six philosophers elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences

They are:  Cheshire Calhoun (Arizona State), Paul Churchland (emeritus, UC San Diego), John Dupre (Exeter), Miranda Fricker (CUNY Graduate Center), Steven Nadler (Wisconsin), and Laura Ruetsche (Michigan).

"The Liar Tweets Tonight"

This is very funny:

(Thanks to Peter Carruthers for the pointer.)

 

Purdue, a large, public research university in Indiana, plans to open this fall

And here's some of their tentative plans, which are instructive:

Our campus community, a “city” of 50,000+ people, is highly unusual in its makeup. At least 80% of our population is made up of young people, say, 35 and under. All data to date tell us that the COVID-19 virus, while it transmits rapidly in this age group, poses close to zero lethal threat to them.

Meanwhile, the virus has proven to be a serious danger to other, older demographic groups, especially those with underlying health problems. The roughly 20% of our Purdue community who are over 35 years old contains a significant number of people with diabetes, asthma [sic], hypertension, and other ailments which together comprise a very high percentage of the fatal and most severe COVID-19 cases.

We will consider new policies and practices that keep these groups separate, or minimize contact between them. Literally, our students pose a far greater danger to others than the virus poses to them. We all have a role, and a responsibility, in ensuring the health of the Purdue community.

The approaches below are preliminary, meant to be illustrative of the objectives we will pursue. View them as examples, likely to be replaced by better ideas as we identify and validate them.

They could include spreading out classes across days and times to reduce their size, more use of online instruction for on-campus students, virtualizing laboratory work, and similar steps.

We will look to protect the more vulnerable members of our community by allowing (or requiring, if necessary) them to work remotely. Like the rest of society, we are learning a lot right now about which jobs are most amenable to remote work, and about new and better ways to do such work.

How one resort plans to reopen "safely"

This is instructive, not only for what some businesses may need to do, but what universities may also need to do.  I assume they're making this public to reassure potential customers; it is quite a detailed plan, do take a look.

A Marxist perspective on the pandemic and the "response" to it

I don't agree with all of this, but I do agree with the basic point:

[T]he Times asserted that it will become necessary to accept that there is a “trade-off between saving lives and saving the economy.” While in the short term the two goals may be aligned, in “the longer run, though, it’s important to acknowledge that a trade-off will emerge—and become more urgent in the coming months, as the economy slides deeper into recession.”

In its analysis of the “trade off,” the Times proceeds from the unquestioned premise that economic interests can only be those of the capitalist class. The profit system, private ownership of the productive forces and vast personal wealth are unalterable and eternal. Therefore, the “trade off” requires, inevitably, the sacrifice of human life, specifically, the lives of working people.

If productive power were rationally organized to meet human needs, we wouldn't be facing this particular trade-off (there might be others).  (As an aside, I was amused to see Simon Critchley described in the article, rather generously, as an "academic blowhard"!)

On the etiology of belief, and luck

Philosopher Miriam Schoenfield (Texas) comments.

A drink for our times

(Thanks to Gregory Mayer for the pointer.)

Richard Marshall interviews Charlie Huenemann (Utah State)...

...at 3:16 AM.  (Link now fixed.)

The California antibody serology studies and the case of New York City

This offers a useful summary of the doubts about the recent serology studies in Santa Clara and Los Angeles, and then raises a concern based on New York City data:

[T]he current serology tests have relatively high percentages of false positives, ones which may be higher than the prevalence of COVID19 in the population itself. Here’s how to understand this. If you have a test that produces 5% false positives and your study finds an infection rate of 3% in the population it’s possible all your positives are false positives. You really don’t know what your results are telling you. There are also questions about how representative the samples were (a difficult task in these initial studies.) But the accuracy of the tests is the key issue, especially in populations where on a tiny fraction has been exposed....

[F]or something in the range of [the serology study's author's] IFR to be accurate [they estimate .1 to .2%], literally the entire population of New York City would have to have been infected already.

The numbers are straightforward: as of two days ago, there were 9,101 lab confirmed cases and 4,582 presumptive diagnosed cases for a total of 13,683 fatalities In New York City. The population of New York City is 8,398,748. That comes to either .11% or .16% depending on which death toll number is used.

I do not think anyone thinks 100% exposure is at all possible. Even if we assume what I think most experts would consider the highly unlikely possibility that 50% of New Yorkers have been infected with COVID19 that would mean a .33% IFR. To be generous, let’s say a third of the population of New York City had already been infected with COVID19 – very high but not inconceivable. That would mean a IFR of .49%.

Thoughts from readers on this analysis?  (Thanks to Ned Block for the pointer.)

ADDENDUM:  And for additional doubts, see this piece.  (Thanks to Dr. David Ozonoff for the pointer.)

Threadgill's in Austin closes

I saw the sad news from a friend on FB.  Janis Joplin sang here when she was a student at UT Austin in the 1960s, but, more importantly, the place served up really good Southern cooking (chicken-fried steak anyone?), and it was inexpensive and fun.  When we lived in Austin, from 1995 to 2008, we used to go there often with our kids, since as loud as they were, Threagill's was louder, plus it had tons of stuff they liked too.

The pandemic and Anglophone universities...

...with a particular focus on the impact on the UK.

UPDATE:  Unfortunately, this article is now behind a Financial Times paywall.

Pulse oximeters, again

A propos an earlier post, this emergency medicine doctor recommends having one on hand for early detection of COVID-related pneumonia:

We are just beginning to recognize that Covid pneumonia initially causes a form of oxygen deprivation we call “silent hypoxia” — “silent” because of its insidious, hard-to-detect nature.

Pneumonia is an infection of the lungs in which the air sacs fill with fluid or pus. Normally, patients develop chest discomfort, pain with breathing and other breathing problems. But when Covid pneumonia first strikes, patients don’t feel short of breath, even as their oxygen levels fall. And by the time they do, they have alarmingly low oxygen levels and moderate-to-severe pneumonia (as seen on chest X-rays). Normal oxygen saturation for most persons at sea level is 94 percent to 100 percent; Covid pneumonia patients I saw had oxygen saturations as low as 50 percent.

To my amazement, most patients I saw said they had been sick for a week or so with fever, cough, upset stomach and fatigue, but they only became short of breath the day they came to the hospital. Their pneumonia had clearly been going on for days, but by the time they felt they had to go to the hospital, they were often already in critical condition....

Philosopher Alexander Bird (KCL) explains epidemiological modelling...

...and other COVID-related topics.

(Thanks to James Uccello for the pointer.)

When the "war" against COVID-19 is over, I hope there will be war crimes trials to hold to account those who caused unnecessary deaths

The incompetent monster-child declared himself a "wartime President," and indeed he is.  And thus when the war is over, it will be time for war crimes trials.   Here is an initial useful accounting; Dr. Redfield of the CDC and Dr. Hahn of the FDA will have a lot to answer for, even if their incompetence doesn't rise to the level of a capital crime.  Trump, himself, is a different matter:  his failure to lead has killed and will kill thousands of people (and see also).   (Lets not forget that Trump is also exacting political revenge by denying help to citizens of states whose governors he doesn't like.)    Someone who should probably join Trump on the gallows--only after a thorough and fair trial, of course--is the absurd Jared Kushner.

This article is correct that the pandemic has revealed the profound dysfunction of the American polity at the national level (and at some state levels).  The blame for that has to be laid at the door of Reagan's repeal of the "fairness doctrine" which prevented propaganda outlets like Rush Limbaugh and Fox News from occupying the public airwaves.  So a suitable war crimes trial should alsto put Roger Ailes on the docket posthumously, and try Sean Hannity et al. for crimes against humanity (and decency).

UPDATE:  It looks like the evidence is in, Hannity is heading for the gallows too!

Eric Feigl-Ding is not worth following on Twitter

Early on, Eric Feigl-Ding--who turns out to have a PhD in nutrition not anything related to epidemiology--was one of the first to express proper alarm about COVID-19 and he was also a useful source of links to medical and science journals and news outlets covering the new coronavirus (useful, at least, for someone like me not familiar with the relevant venues).  He also led me to other actual experts, like Dr. Marc Lipsitch, an epidemiologist at Harvard.  But it became clear that he was shooting from the hip too often, and I gave up on following him entirely on April 7 after this idiotic bit of sensationalism.   A number of critical articles have now appeared, including here and here.

(Thanks to Nick Serafin and Robert Gressis for the pointers to articles about Feigl-Ding.)

How far out are you cancelling work-related trips?

MOVING TO FRONT FROM APRIL 3--WOULD STILL LIKE TO HEAR FROM MORE READERS ABOUT THEIR PLANS GOING FORWARD

I'm curious, and perhaps other readers are too, to hear how far out folks are cancelling planned travel for workshops, seminars, conferences etc.  My last "live" event was in Madison, Wisconsin on March 11; from then on I've cancelled events (or had the events cancelled) in Hamilton (Ontario), Durham, York, Lincoln, Riverside, Amsterdam, Oxford, and Dublin, and that's through early July.  (I hope to manage some "virtual" seminars related to some of these.)  I've also pulled out of a "South American tour" I was very much looking forward to that would have begun very late August and gone into September, that would have included Bogota, Quito, La Paz, and maybe Rio--I'm hoping it will happen a year hence.  No decision yet on whether I will be teaching for a few weeks at Rome III later in the fall, as originally planned, but I'm not feeling optimistic.

So how far out are you cancelling or are events you were going to attend being cancelled?

Is immortality worth it?

Philosopher John Martin Fischer (UC Riverside) discusses.

More than 43% of patients testing positive for the new coronavirus were asymptomatic...

...in this town in Italy.   [Link now fixed.] Strikingly, symptomatic and asymptomatic patients had similar viral loads on their systems.   All patients cleared the virus from their bodies in roughly 8-13 days.

IHME COVID-19 model from U of Washington isn't very good

We noted it near the end of March (and see the prescient comment by reader Robert Lee there), but the consensus now seems to be that it's junk:

“It’s not a model that most of us in the infectious disease epidemiology field think is well suited” to projecting Covid-19 deaths, epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health told reporters this week, referring to projections by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington.

Others experts, including some colleagues of the model-makers, are even harsher. “That the IHME model keeps changing is evidence of its lack of reliability as a predictive tool,” said epidemiologist Ruth Etzioni of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, who has served on a search committee for IHME. “That it is being used for policy decisions and its results interpreted wrongly is a travesty unfolding before our eyes.”

The article includes a good explanation of traditional infectious disease modelling and contrasts it with what IHME has been doing.

(Thanks to Dr. David Ozonoff for the pointer.)

 

 

Is glucose metabolism key to cytokine storms?

The headline of this article overstates the findings, but they may well be significant (and would explain why diabetes is a comorobidity for COVID-19 infections):

During an infection, the body’s immune system ramps up the release of molecules called cytokines, which circulate in the blood stream like messengers calling upon immune cells to come and join the fight. In some patients, for largely inexplicable reasons, this battle cry continues even after the invading pathogen begins to retreat....Such a sustained excessive cytokine release, or storm, is the cause of death in a variety of infectious diseases including the flu, COVID-19, Ebola, and sepsis....

The transcription factor interferon regulatory factor 5 (IRF5) is critical for pro-inflammatory cytokine production and, if it is genetically deleted in mice, the animals are protected against influenza-induced cytokine storms. The inflammatory response to influenza infections is also known to drive up glucose metabolism, in part so that immune cells have the necessary energy to mount a strong response, and also because the virus needs the sugar to replicate....

Shi Liu of the State Key Laboratory of Virology at Wuhan University and colleagues now link these threads, identifying a specific glucose metabolism pathway that is required for activating IRF5-induced cytokine production in cells and mice. This so-called hexosamine biosynthesis pathway, a well-known metabolic process, is also required for viral replication, they show.

Who has been more incompetent in dealing with the coronavirus: Trump or Boris Johnson?

Johnson is giving the monster-child a run for the money!

Diabetes looks to be more significant comorbidilty for COVID-19 than COPD; asthma not a comorbidity...

...in this commentary based on data from China and Italy.  As the NYT recently reported, asthma was also missing as a risk factor based on data from New York.  (Earlier coverage.)