A Concerned Scientist @BE@social.cleverlibre.org

Don't forget to set your clocks ahead an hour in most of the US this weekend.

I normally never say this to anyone, but I've found a LOT of people seem to think that Congress ended the twice a year time shenanigans last year. They didn't. The Senate passed it, but the House never even took it up.

"The mayor of NYC, recently knighted by the Biden administration, has taken up a crusade against masking. He suggests mask use helps criminals by telling shops that they shouldn’t let in people wearing a mask."

https://easychair.substack.com/p/the-war-on-masks

The "science" of constant reinfection laid out by @fitterhappierAJ

https://www.npr.org/2023/03/02/1160358099/school-attendance-chronic-absenteeism-covid

Yet another "it's a mystery!" article. This one from the formerly reliable news source of NPR with such gems as:

"I think people have been a little bit under the false impression that when COVID became more endemic, that that would then result in a significant improvement in attendance. And I'm not seeing that."

and

"...Carlson says his district's Native families don't generally think of school as a safe place.

"It's really difficult to get those families to say, 'Yeah, sure, we'd love to send our kids back to school.' "

The solution? Not making schools more safe, of course. That would be too straightforward.

"Money is not an issue ... The entire nation is currently flooded with federal [COVID] assistance money."

"Home visits are one proven strategy schools are investing in."

or

"His district has also hired more attendance counselors and "community navigators" to help caregivers tap into district resources"

or even

"Chang says another way to improve attendance is to gather regular, transparent data throughout the school-year, rather than only once, at the end of the year."

because, clearly, collecting attendance data will solve the problem.

These people really don't get it and I've lost hope that they ever will.

An acquaintance of mine is sending out pictures to people this morning at the Super Bowl festivities, and casually mentioned that everyone is sick because there's "something going around" and laughing about how everyone is "staying in bed sick all day every day so that they can party all night" and I had two realizations.

One, 20 years ago this totally would have been me...but we weren't in the midst of a pandemic.

Two, I'm bothered by it all.

To add to the growing list of sources about this here's an article from the ACLU just prior to the pandemic about how these laws have been used. I can't believe I missed this before:

https://www.aclu.org/news/free-speech/americas-mask-bans-in-the-age-of-face-recognition-surveillance

I'd like to point out to anyone who thinks that "you do you" public health is sustainable that it's illegal to wear a mask in many public places in the US. This has only been on hold because of the emergency declaration and that's about to end.

For example, let me introduce you to my local law in Florida. Florida State statute 876.12:

Wearing mask, hood, or other device on public way.—No person or persons over 16 years of age shall, while wearing any mask, hood, or device whereby any portion of the face is so hidden, concealed, or covered as to conceal the identity of the wearer, enter upon, or be or appear upon any lane, walk, alley, street, road, highway, or other public way in this state.

This law was pointed out to my wife by a law enforcement officer who really wanted to arrest her for wearing a mask in a grocery store last year.

If you think you're going to be able to avoid COVID after the end of the emergency declaration you'd better be a full on hermit who never has to venture out.

Know what DeSantis does? He comes through with a pay raise for teachers every single year. Know how many of those there were before him? Off the top of my head:

One for $2500 by Rick Scott over his 8 years. Charlie Crist vetoed one that passed the state legislature. Jeb Bush talked about it? Maybe went through with one? I’m honestly not sure on that one, but that gets you back to the 90's.

Are those 30% of teachers who identify as liberals mad? I’m sure they are. I’m sure you can even get quotes from a lot of them. I have this general discussion with friends who live on the west coast and other liberal areas all the time. It’s like a different world down here. It *feels* like there should be outrage. I get it. However, teachers down here aren’t largely ideologically against DeSantis and they’ve seen more raises the last four years than they’ve ever seen before. The population at large is even less liberal than the teachers and they think DeSantis is the greatest thing ever.

I guess my point is this. If you think there’s about to be an uprising against DeSantis in Florida it’s not going to come from some silent majority. They don’t exist. Point to Florida from wherever you are and say “Let’s not end up like that here” but, honestly, stop acting like the people here don’t have the government that the majority want. Florida has moved from a swing state to a solidly republican majority.

I mean, I agree with the outrage and all, but, look, the reality on the ground here is that even the majority of teachers love DeSantis across the state. I say this as the husband of a longtime teacher here who’s no longer in the classroom, but stays plugged into the local community of teachers. She's in a lot of teacher chat groups. There's no mass outrage. This morning the biggest discussion I saw amongst teachers was them talking about how kids are "rightfully angry and lashing out these days because the government came in and locked them down in their homes" years ago....for all of like two weeks, but, honestly, that’s the predominant discussion here.

The last data that I saw from the Florida teacher's union was that about half of teachers voted for Hillary and only about 30% of them identify as Democrats. There's not a ton of ideological outrage about any of this, frankly, and it's hyper localized. Know how many counties voted against DeSantis all of three months ago? 5. Out of 67. Two around Tallahassee, one at Jacksonville, one at Orlando and one north of Miami. Even Tampa voted for DeSantis this time.

I currently split my time between my off-grid life in the Appalachians that we're working on making a real full time homestead and suburban Florida. Every time we take a little time up north and then come back south I swear it's noticeably further to the political right. I'm going to preface this with the fact that I am vehemently anti-DeSantis, so don't come at me with any "DeSantis apologist" crap.

This is going to be unpopular amongst most of the people that I follow on here, but, I think it needs to be said, so I'm going to say it.

I see a lot of posts about Florida teachers here, and understandably so, there’s a lot of wild stuff coming from the Governor’s office. Unfortunately probably 99% of those posts come from outside of the state and I’m here to tell you something.

I don't know exactly how to say this, so I usually stay outside of political conversations here, but, calls for a teacher strike or all of the "I'm outraged at Florida" posts really reek of outsider echo chamber. I don't want to be the "Sure that sounds great, but" guy all the time, so I just don't get into it. They just aren’t representative of the people in Florida, though.

If possible, I'd like to pick the brains of the more biologically inclined out there.

Piggybacking off of this article that @fitterhappierAJ posted today, this is something that's been on my mind for a long time now and I'm not afraid that I feel like I'm missing something.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00086-1

I've read about "original antigenic sin" aka imprinting for a year or two now in regards to COVID and vaccines. I believe I understand the basics and have long been under the impression that continually updated mRNA vaccines would give positive, but limited benefits.

Given what we know, should we see the bivalent vaccine as having over-performed thus far? Is there a real benefit to continually updated mRNA vaccines after all?

Our health messaging sucks, proven yet again.

They went out last night, maskless, "but outside for most of the time" so, therefore, obviously safe.

Today her and her husband decided to stay 6' away from each other because that guarantees he won't get it. Yes, they're hanging out together in the same room, but staying 6' apart.

It's been a while since someone I knew well shared all of their thoughts regarding COVID and it just baffles me how this is what people believe, but it goes to show we're probably never getting out of this mess. Plan accordingly in your life.

To balance out my frustration of yesterday here's how my Sunday is going so far.

It's a beautiful, cold day in the woods. My wife keeps feeding me fresh hush puppies and the kids are cleaning without even being told to. The 9yo even put on a mask to "not smell stuff" while cleaning and wandered off talking about how awesome masks are.

Not sure what I did to deserve such a nice Sunday, but I'll take it.

Before it comes up, I feel the need to say, too, that this woman and her husband are college educated, west coast liberals. We're not talking the southern Republicans that I live around. We're so far from having the right discussions around COVID and the future.

I know I've said it before, but I never try to convince people in my life that COVID's serious anymore. It just always leaves me frustrated.

So, that said, my wife best friend just texted to say she's got COVID for the first time and she knows we "keep up with COVID" and wanted to ask some questions. Sure, no problem.

She was on a flight last weekend and asks if it's possible that she just tested positive now. We tell her that RAT's are supposedly around day 5-11 now, so that's totally possible.

She asks if we know what the workplace rules are for her, and sure we send her a link. She says that's not at all what her boss said, but OK.

She asks if it's even possible to not give her husband COVID. We go over ventilation, filtration, masks, etc and this is where it really starts to go off the rails. She's just like "Yeah, we're not doing any of that."

She asks if long COVID "is real" or if there's anything else she should know and we're like yeah, it is, there's a lot that's unknown. We're sending you some links about what is known with long COVID rates, the things to look out for, what you can try to do in the meantime, etc. and she reads it and goes "Ummm, yeah. That all looks super sketchy. If any of that were real I'm sure the news would be talking about it. I'm sorry but I think you guys have fallen for some hoax or something here. I have a fever, a runny nose and muscle aches. I'm going to take some Tylenol. We have a birthday party to attend tonight, a kid's party tomorrow and my boss wants me back at work on Monday. Thanks anyway."

I give up.

I'm pretty sure "grappling with candidate quality" isn't the best way to frame the GOP's electoral problems.

https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/3802872-gop-grapples-with-candidate-quality-problem-ahead-of-2024/

My 9yo and 11yo boys have been dabbling with coding in python, swift, java and html for a couple of years now on and off. Yesterday they decided to participate in their first code jam. They started out, got it set up the way they wanted and left it until today.

This morning turned into nothing but arguing as it didn't come together the way they both wanted it to. The arguing turned into a huge fight(as an aside, as an only child I'm continually impressed by how much and how often brothers can fight, particularly over the smallest of things) and they both ran away crying and screaming at each other. I decided not to intervene and just let it play out.

Well, a couple of hours later I heard them cheering and went to check on them. They were jumping up and down, hugging, and cheering because they finally worked out the code they were stuck on and it was working the way they wanted. They've been glued to the computer working on the rest of their code for hours straight now.

It's not easy to convince kids these days to be resilient, at all, when everything seems to be geared towards instant gratification, but it's so worth it when it works out. However the rest of their project works out it was already a win in my book.

I'll leave it at that for now. I just needed to put this down somewhere, probably to help me wrap my own head around it. I'm surrounded by what I think that I clearly see as cognitive dissonance. In the midst of a global pandemic how can you be constantly sick, but think the two are unrelated? How can you think that they might be related, but still do nothing about it?

And, again, I really wonder....is it just me? Do I know a lot of people who seem adversely affected, and have gone from extremely healthy to very unhealthy over the last year or two while other people don't? Or is this what everyone is seeing, but, somehow not reacting to?

Lately I kick all of this around in my head wondering what the end game is, but, perhaps I'm asking the wrong questions because I read a lot of scientific studies and apply what I'm reading to the world around me, and in the end my experiences aren't what everyone else is seeing?

One more case in my little anecdotal study here, for now. My wife's boss. She, thankfully, seems to see the problems. Recently she allowed my wife to skip a "mandatory" in person meeting(we both work from home, and I have worked from home since ~2015 when I stepped out of the lab) when my wife said she was still being COVID cautious. Her response was that she wished she had been because she was recovering from her 5th infection and after her 4th she developed "a mysterious autoimmune disorder" that her doctor was having a hard time figuring out. She realizes that it was likely COVID, but, still takes very few precautions.

Another friend of mine is a really smart scientific mind. He's a science teacher and decided early on that he was going to go through whatever happened while in the classroom. I don't know exactly how many COVID infections he's had, let's just call it multiple. Neither him, his wife, nor their two kids can get healthy at this point. He's missed over 50% of his work days this semester, his kids are never able to go to daycare or school, and it's just one infection after another. The flu, croup, RSV, colds, COVID, etc. In his own words he just "can't get healthy. It's like my immune system doesn't work anymore" but he, also, believes it has nothing to do with COVID. Not that he has an explanation, but, clearly not COVID in his mind.

My wife's friend, also a teacher, has had an almost identical experience. Without belaboring the point, she is sick all of the time. Sadly, her little kid, now 2, has spent half of her life constantly sick. Just last week she was telling my wife that all she wanted was for them to be healthy for 2 weeks. Just 2 weeks and maybe they could have a good Christmas. They haven't managed 2 weeks once this semester. So what happened? This morning she was practically sobbing to my wife that they're sick, again, and she's far too sick to make it in to teach today.

My wife's best friend since they were kids is clearly the lucky one here. She locked herself down for two years, never went anywhere without a mask and then at the beginning of this year just decided to be done with all of that. She's travelled around the country to weddings and restaurants and swears she's as healthy as ever and never even got sick this year. I take her at her word.

My best friend, on the other hand, also was extremely cautious for a couple of years and then decided he was over it early this year. He's a veteran and hasn't missed his morning run, rain, sleet or snow, for decades....until he got COVID. Afterward he physically couldn't any longer. All of his joints hurt. He was diagnosed with autoimmune, or rheumatoid, arthritis. Now, if you ask him COVID has absolutely nothing to do with it. It was just a coincidence, and, again, I'm not here to argue that. I'm talking strictly anecdotal experiences here.