I think I am very much in agreement with you and your world view.
But if I should try to summarize my understanding of other people’s view on this is that there are many aspects of life where relative wealth matter: whether you get the girl you like might depend on your relative looks, charms, and wealth. Your status in society and among your friends do in some part depend on your relative wealth. Whether you get to live in the best part of town will depend on your ability to bid the most for the right to live there.
For people who think like that, your arguments might sound like you trying to buy them off with a bigger slice of (non-metaphorical) pie while you make off with the girl.
Rasmus Faber-Espensen
Karma: 34
Great to get a rough estimate of this. I had been wondering the same thing.
But at least in my country (Denmark), vaccinations are limited by the supply. The infrastructure has already been expanded to be able to handle the much higher rate of vaccinations that we will hopefully get later in the year, when the production has ramped further up.
So, I would expect that the temporary halt will be followed by a period of higher activity, where the unused supply is used.
Sort of like this: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/10AzZMJFIDt-cZUUI2MmHLHsU7gSJWj2gpAJlzi5Z08s/edit?usp=sharing , which gives a much lower cost (but still much more than one extra death).
We remove false claims about how and where COVID-19 can be transmitted and who can be infected. This includes: [..] Claims that COVID-19 can be transmitted from anything other than human-to-human transmission
Interestingly, the Danish version of the Facebook policy page does not include this clause (only forbidding claims about transmission by mosquitoes).
So I guess we actually can discuss why we culled 17 million minks (we just have to avoid discussing it with our English speaking friends).
I have tried to investigate and after much search (and having a question on r/askscience about it closed due to this being easily googleable) this is a summary of what I have found:
Apparently the mutation in the spike protein and the receptor binding domain lets the virus ‘easier’ bind to the ACE2 receptor sites and thus infect the cells.
So for a given amount of exposure you have a higher risk of getting infected with B.1.1.7 as compared to the old strain.
So bad news, I guess. There does not seem to be any low-hanging fruit here. Only harder restrictions (and more vaccinations) will help.
Best sources was this: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.12.24.20248822v2.full.pdf and this: https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/kjo7zm/how_do_experts_come_to_know_that_the_recent/
So it is clear that B.1.1.7, the English strain, is more transmissible than the old strain.
But what do we know about the methods of the increased transmissibility?
Do you need less exposure to the new strain to get infected? (Less time? Less amount of virus?) Do the virus persist in the air for longer time? Do the virus transmit more via different pathways?
We started out by using the protections that worked best against the flu: lots of handwashing, disinfecting surfaces etc. We adjusted this when we learned more about Covid-19: masks reduces transmission etc. Is there anything we can adjust to protect better against the English strain? Is it just strictly more infectious, or is it also that it is better than the old strain at transmitting through a specific pathway that we have not been protecting as much?
The newest report estimates the reproduction number (R) for all types of Covid-19 in Denmark to 0.64 (95% CI [0.56 ; 0.73]) and for B.1.1.7 to 1.07 (95% CI [0.83 ; 1.32]). This translates to a relative reproduction number of 1.67. B.1.1.7 is now 12.1% of tested samples. It looks like it will dominate in 3-4 weeks at which point we should expect infections to start rising again.
The report also contains some interesting details about how they estimate the reproduction numbers (rolling poisson regression with beta correction).
I think this is a major obstacle: Natural reservoirs. Covid-19 is transmittable between species.
To be fair, Pfizer has reduced deliveries to all countries that follow EMA guidelines, even those that haven’t been able to consistently extract 6 doses per vial. I guess they are just hard-pressed to deliver the vaccines they have promised, and are thus seizing this as an excuse to reduce the deliveries.
Denmark’s SSI is now estimating the relative reproduction number for B.1.1.7 to 1.36. Since Denmark now has R=0.6 with the current restrictions, this should mean that B.1.1.7 infections here is currently falling.
In less good news: Denmark was from the beginning extracting 6-7 doses per vial of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, sensibly ignoring EMA’s guidelines only permitting 5 doses per vial. The Danish plan for vaccinations thus took the extra doses into account. But Pfizer has now informed Denmark that since they are extracting extra doses from the vials, they will reduce the deliveries accordingly (since the contracts specified number of doses and not vials), thus forcing Denmark to make a new slower plan.
As for that plan, I can’t help getting a bit worried when I see the jump in expected weekly vaccine deliveries jump from 85,000 in week 13, the last week with confirmed deliveries, to 750,000 in week 14, the first week with only forecasts.
I am curious. How would you rate this story? It has some continuity errors, but it got my eyes moist.
# Four Stars
*A life told in online reviews.*
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**Sunshine Pediatrics — Yelp — ★★★★★**
*Reviewed by: DadOfTwo — March 18, 2005*
Five stars. Dr. Kapoor delivered our daughter at 3:47 AM on the coldest night of the year. The heat in the delivery room wasn’t working. My wife was in labor for nineteen hours. Dr. Kapoor never left. At one point, around hour sixteen, she took off her own sweater and put it over my wife’s shoulders, and my wife said, “I can’t do this,” and Dr. Kapoor said, “You’re already doing it,” and thirty minutes later our daughter was born and she was perfect and the room was freezing and none of us cared. Five stars. Would give six if the system allowed.
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**Tony’s Pizza, Court Street — Google Reviews — ★★★★☆**
*Reviewed by: DadOfTwo — September 3, 2007*
Great pizza. We’ve been coming here since before the kids were born and Tony still remembers our order (one large margherita, one side of garlic knots, two small lemonades for the girls). Tonight our youngest, who is two, threw a garlic knot at a stranger. The stranger caught it one-handed without looking up from his newspaper. Tony laughed so hard he burned a calzone. Deducting one star because the lemonades are $4 each and they’re mostly ice. But we’ll be back next week, same as always.
---
**Crayola 64-Count Crayons — Amazon — ★★★★★**
*Reviewed by: DadOfTwo — December 26, 2008*
My daughter (age 3) ate the burnt sienna. She’s fine. The crayon is not. Replacing and upgrading to the 96-count because apparently 64 colors is “not enough to draw the world, Daddy.” She may have a point. Five stars for a product that inspires philosophy in a toddler.
---
**IKEA KALLAX Shelf Unit — Amazon — ★★★☆☆**
*Reviewed by: DadOfTwo — February 14, 2010*
Took four hours to assemble. Instructions are in Swedish, or possibly interpretive dance notation. My wife and I argued about Step 7 for forty-five minutes. Step 7 involves a dowel and a cam lock and what appears to be a prayer. At one point she said, “Maybe we should read the instructions,” and I said, “I AM reading the instructions,” and she said, “You’re reading them upside down,” and she was right, and this is a metaphor for our marriage, which is also occasionally assembled upside down but remains standing. Three stars for the shelf. Five stars for the marriage. Averaging to four but rounding down because the cam lock is an abomination.
---
**Disney World — Magic Kingdom — TripAdvisor — ★★★★★**
*Reviewed by: DadOfTwo — April 9, 2012*
I am a forty-one-year-old man and I cried on the Dumbo ride. Not because of the ride. Because my daughter — my oldest, the one Dr. Kapoor delivered in the freezing room — was sitting in front of me in the flying elephant, and she turned around and her face was — I don’t have a word for it. The face of a seven-year-old who believes she is flying. Not pretending to fly. Not enjoying a simulation of flight. Believing, with the full, unreserved commitment of a person who has not yet been informed that elephants don’t fly and that the ride is a motor and a steel arm and a hydraulic pump.
I cried because I realized I was looking at something temporary. Not the ride — the belief. The ability to sit in a machine and feel the sky. She’ll lose it. Everyone loses it. And no one warns you that the thing you’ll miss most about your children being small is not the smallness but the believing.
Five stars. Bring tissues.
---
**U-Haul, Flatbush Avenue Location — Yelp — ★★☆☆☆**
*Reviewed by: DadOfTwo — August 22, 2015*
Rented a truck to move my wife’s things to her new apartment. The truck smelled like someone else’s move — cardboard and tape and the particular staleness of a vehicle that has carried the contents of many lives going in different directions. The staff was fine. The truck ran fine. I am deducting stars because the experience of returning an empty U-Haul to a lot on Flatbush Avenue at 9 PM on a Saturday, alone, and then walking home to a house that is now half-empty, is not a five-star experience, and I have to put the stars somewhere.
This is not a review of U-Haul. I know that. I’m sorry. Two stars.
---
**Bialetti Moka Express, 6-Cup — Amazon — ★★★★★**
*Reviewed by: DadOfTwo — November 30, 2015*
I bought this because my wife — my ex-wife — took the coffee maker. She took the coffee maker and the toaster and the good cutting board and the painting from the hallway, all of which were fair, all of which were hers or ours in a way that became hers in the division, and I didn’t argue about any of it, but I woke up the morning after the move and there was no coffee and the absence of coffee felt like the first honest measure of what had changed, because everything else — the empty closet, the missing painting, the quiet — was abstract, but the coffee was concrete. I needed coffee and there was no machine to make it.
So I bought this. The Bialetti. Six cups, stovetop, the little Italian man with the mustache on the side. It makes coffee that is too strong and slightly bitter and entirely mine. I stand in the kitchen and I wait for it and the sound it makes — that low, rising gurgle when the water boils up through the grounds — is the sound of my new morning, which is not the old morning, which is just a morning, which is enough.
Five stars. It makes coffee. It makes mornings possible. Same thing.
---
**Kumon Math Tutoring, Park Slope — Google Reviews — ★★★★☆**
*Reviewed by: DadOfTwo — March 3, 2017*
My youngest hates math. She hates it the way some people hate rain — personally, as an affront, as though the numbers are doing it on purpose. Kumon has helped. She still hates math, but she’s now capable of hating it while also doing it correctly, which is a form of maturity I did not expect from a nine-year-old but which I recognize from my own life, where I do many things I hate correctly, including filing taxes and folding fitted sheets.
Four stars. One deducted because the waiting room chairs are designed for people without spines.
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**The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger — Goodreads — ★★★★☆**
*Reviewed by: DadOfTwo — January 15, 2019*
My oldest is fourteen and she’s reading this for school and she asked me what I thought of it and I said I loved it when I was her age and she said “It’s kind of whiny” and I felt the entire foundation of my adolescent identity shift beneath me.
She’s not wrong. Holden is whiny. He’s also heartbroken and confused and trying to hold on to something he can feel slipping away, and he doesn’t have the language for it, so he complains about phonies instead. I didn’t tell her that. She’ll figure it out. Or she won’t, and she’ll go through life thinking Holden Caulfield was whiny, and that’s fine too, because the beautiful thing about your children growing up is that they get to be wrong about different things than you were wrong about.
Four stars for the book. Five for the conversation.
---
**Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center — Google Reviews — ★★★★★**
*Reviewed by: DadOfTwo — June 8, 2020*
I don’t know how to review a hospital. The parking is bad. The coffee is worse. The waiting room has a television that plays CNN at a volume calibrated to make anxiety feel competitive.
But Dr. Chen saved my life, or extended it, or gave me more of it than I was going to get, and the distinction between those three things is one I don’t care about anymore. She sat across from me in an office the size of a closet and she said, “The treatment is working,” and she said it the way Dr. Kapoor said “You’re already doing it” fifteen years ago — with the calm certainty of a person who does this every day and has learned that certainty, even borrowed certainty, is the most useful thing she can give.
I’m in remission. I don’t know for how long. Nobody knows for how long. But I’m here, and my girls are sixteen and fifteen, and my youngest still hates math and my oldest still thinks Holden Caulfield is whiny, and I’m going to be at their graduations if the universe allows, and if it doesn’t, I was at least here for the garlic knots and the Dumbo ride and the IKEA shelf that we assembled upside down, and that’s not nothing. That’s not nothing at all.
Five stars. I’m alive. What else do you want from a hospital?
---
**Tony’s Pizza, Court Street — Google Reviews — ★★★★★**
*Reviewed by: DadOfTwo — March 5, 2022*
Tony retired. His son runs the place now. The pizza is the same. The lemonades are $6 each and still mostly ice.
My daughters are here — twenty-two and twenty — and they ordered the same thing we’ve always ordered. One large margherita, one side of garlic knots. They don’t get lemonades anymore; they get beer, because they’re old enough now, which is a sentence I’m still adjusting to.
My youngest told a story about the time she threw a garlic knot at a stranger. She doesn’t remember it — she was two — but she’s heard me tell it so many times that it’s become her memory, the way family stories do: they migrate from the person who lived them to the people who were told them, and by the third or fourth telling, the border between living and being told dissolves.
The stranger who caught the garlic knot. Tony burning the calzone. The lemonades that were mostly ice. These things happened seventeen years ago in this same booth and they are happening again right now in the telling, and the telling is its own kind of living, and the booth is the same booth, and the pizza is the same pizza, and my daughters are not the same daughters — they are large and loud and opinionated and beautiful and they argue about things I don’t understand and they pay for their own beer and they don’t need me to cut their pizza anymore — but they are here. They are here, and I am here, and the garlic knots are $7 now and worth every cent.
Five stars. Would give six. The system still doesn’t allow it.