The You&Me Blog

Probably we are just belaboring the obvious at this point, but another bulletin from the world of social rather than scientific thinking. From a U. S. News report on the Governor of New Mexico getting salty with the town of Gallup. “She also required that businesses in Gallup close from 5 p.m. to 8 a.m. in the city of about 70,000 people along Interstate 40, which remained open to through traffic. Gallup is a hub for basic household supplies, liquor sales and water-container refills for people living in remote stretches of the Navajo Nation — often without full indoor plumbing — and...
An exit plan is a good start, but if you are a government you may actually have to do something to make it happen. Let’s pick on North Carolina for a moment. They have a nice informative website; ( https://www.ncdhhs.gov/divisions/public-health/covid19/covid-19-nc-case-... ) where they lay out some metrics related to “re-opening” the state. One of these is having 30 days of “PPE” (another buzzword like “ventilators” that one gets the impression the few of those using the term really know what it means) on hand included “N-95” masks (ditto.) Unfortunately, as of this writing (April 30, 2020)...
We’ve already talked about how our media, with it lust for clickbait, and our disorganized leadership, both politicians with political agendas and bureaucrats with bureaucratic agendas, have stoked unnecessary fear and anxiety in the United States (and probably in other countries too), over “coronavirus” and “COVID-19.” This is not to say that there should be NO concern over this or, indeed, any other infectious agent. Sometimes people get mad when this respiratory virus is compared to other very serious respiratory viruses, such as influenza. Maybe this is because they think that this...
It may be that you have been checking those “coronavirus trackers” on line, wondering what’s up with that virus you may have heard a little bit about. Although interesting, this raw data has some limitations. For one thing, it’s a tally of every assumed/known/reported/estimated case ever, so it’s never going to go down, unless you have access to a time machine somehow. (And you can ignore that silly “recovered” statistic, as no one is tracking that. If a person didn’t die, they recovered in 1-2 weeks, although a bad case of respiratory illness can leave you feeling pretty worn out for a few...
New on the scene; antibody tests for the coronavirus family of viruses. Just the other day the ever-excitable Governor Cuomo of New York (and to be fair, he’s had plenty to be excited about recently) was talking about rolling out an “aggressive” antibody testing effort there, which would help determine how many people had been exposed, and might be immune, to COVID-19 viruses. Filtered through the news media, it is not immediately apparent that the Governor is completely clear on what antibodies actually are, which again, to be fair, is not in his job description. But with the media...
The response of the United States’ plethora of governments and bureaucracies has been severely lacking. Instead of a prepared disaster plan, or even any kind of actual scientifically based, risk assessed guidance, US residents have been subjected to mostly panicked reactive restrictions, based more on fears of losing elections rather than fears of overwhelming the US health care system. The latter issue, you might recall, was the main reason that restrictions were felt necessary for a virus that for 90 percent or more of people infected, causes no symptoms or only mild symptoms. Because if...
In fact, maybe it’s a little late. In any case, it is definitely time to start thinking about the world’s regions/countries/entities respond to infectious diseases. This should not be a political exercise. Instead we need to look at what works, what works but at too great a cost, and what does not work, and what does not work at too great a cost, and PLAN accordingly, from the information we have gained from an unprecedented amount of worldwide data. We should have a plan for this type of agent (low virulence, easy spread, can impact vulnerable populations) and also for other infectious...
We’ve noticed that in the media at least (and we have said plenty about how unhelpful they can be) that some people seem to react negatively to attempts to put the current virus concern in context—in other words to provide background information that could be helpful in terms of deciding how we should react to this, or what your own personal level of concern should be. Why the resistance? For some people perhaps, this exercise comes across as trivializing their own emotions, or “shoulding on them,” that is telling them what they “should” feel, which is never, ever helpful. Or, as sadly seems...
One of the underlying principles of our magazine is that medical experiences affect people and their loved ones in ways that a simple “factual’ medical history doesn’t capture. We try to share this part of the people’s stories, because we feel we are presenting something that is both real and true for the people involved, and that giving people the opportunity to know more about what others are feeling and going through can help them feel less alone, or educate them about what other’s stories are truly like. And this viewpoint certainly has relevance today as people in America struggle to...
If someone were to read our blog entries, they might be wondering; what do you have to say about “Coronavirus” or “COVID19” now, You&Me? You were all about not panicking a couple of weeks ago, but what about now? We still have the same advice: Don’t panic. Don’t make any mistake. We are not advocating that anyone deliberately go out and catch a potentially serious respiratory illness. But we are also saying that yes, the snowball of CYA and hysteria and media hype has produced an amazing reaction to what is actually not a very novel threat at all. Every year a fast-spreading debilitating...

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