Week of July 4, 2022
Back from vacation, I am suffering from an acute bout of recency bias. Food, history, and adventure all filled a fantastic time. Sadly our souvenirs (and clothes and toiletries) are still in Paris - Air France lost all of our checked bags, and one of my sons contracted COVID on the flight home. A single event in a multiweek week trip shades the whole experience. At such moments a balanced perspective is a challenge, but it helps that Google's location service thinks I'm still in France. French YouTube advertising is reminding me of the best parts of our trip. And I learned that if I adopt a French dog, Normandise Pet Food will ensure that my pet's "well-being is more than [their] obligation, it's [their] real passion!" I think. I still have to use Google translate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recency_bias
https://www.lanormandise.fr/en/
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Case rates, hospitalizations, and death rates are still rising across the U.S. I see numerous concerns about the under-reporting of cases, including state-to-state and country-to-country variability. You can see discrepancies between the N.Y. Times and F.T. data sets.
N.Y. Times Tracker
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/us/covid-cases.html
Country Comparison from FT.com
https://ig.ft.com/coronavirus-chart/?areas=eur&areas=usa&areas=twn&areas=nzl&areas=e92000001&areas=fra&areasRegional=usny&areasRegional=usnm&areasRegional=uspr&areasRegional=ushi&areasRegional=usfl&areasRegional=usco&cumulative=0&logScale=1&per100K=0&startDate=2021-06-01&values=deaths
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From Helix (a genomics surveillance company), "BA.4 and BA.5 are now at ~50% of cases nationwide (up from 20% two weeks ago), while BA.2.12.1 has declined to only 27% (from 56% earlier). We expect this trend to continue throughout the summer, with a surge in cases dominated by BA.4 / BA.5, as seen in other countries."
https://blog.helix.com/2022/06/our-top-viral-surveillance-insights-in-early-july/
Vaccinated+Boosted individuals have some protection, but BA.4 and BA.5 are more able to escape immunity. Maximal protection still requires good airflow, masking, and vaccination.
https://twitter.com/EricTopol/status/1540412501036150785?s=20&t=3NjYoKkyeGd2IdBBhQf33Q
Dr. Bob Wachter sums up the data in a long, detail-rich thread:
https://twitter.com/Bob_Wachter/status/1543780581074292739
It appears we may see some Omicron-specific vaccines later in 2022, but
https://twitter.com/DrTomFrieden/status/1543315328809279489
and
https://www.npr.org/2022/06/25/1107638114/covid-pfizer-omicron-vaccine
I found this constructive thread on living in a COVID world from Scottish doctor Dan Goyal.
https://twitter.com/danielgoyal/status/1543532421714530332
Random Medical Realities and Technology - follow-up edition
First, The Google A.I. chatbot mentioned in my 6/20/22 newsletter (one of the programmers believed the chatbot is sentient. He went public and was fired.) appears to have hired a (human) lawyer.
https://www.sciencetimes.com/articles/38379/20220625/sentient-ai-lamda-hired-lawyer-advocate-rights-person-google-engineer.htm
The discovery of CRISPR turned ten last week. I still think this is one of the most under-appreciated scientific breakthroughs, with many unconsidered tradeoffs.
Washington Post article:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/as-crispr-turns-10-its-medical-promise-comes-into-focus/2022/06/28/a66c1a2c-f6da-11ec-81db-ac07a394a86b_story.html
and a fantastic Podcast with one of the discovers, Jennifer Doudna, from a Freakanomics Radio podcast - People I (Mostly) Admire
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/we-can-play-god-now/
Infographics!
Remember sunscreen!
https://twitter.com/cenmag/status/1540184198526521346/photo/1
from https://cen.acs.org/biological-chemistry/Periodic-Graphics-chemistry-skin-responds/99/i26
Things I learned this week
While the level of detail travel insurance needs to claim losses from misplaced baggage is absurd, there is (apparently) still ambiguity in car insurance policies. A Missouri court ordered Geico to compensate a car passenger who caught an STD through consensual intercourse in a vehicle Geico insured. An appellate court affirmed the ruling. Unclear how the Geico gecko was involved. You can imagine the fun and additional language auto insurance policies will contain if this stands.
https://www.webmd.com/sexual-conditions/news/20220608/insurer-told-to-pay-millions-to-woman-who-caught-std-in-a-car
Wired wrote about researchers looking at climate change by examining 130 years of menus from restaurants in the Pacific Northwest and Canada.
https://www.wired.com/story/130-year-old-menus-show-how-climate-change-affects-what-we-eat/
and the original research:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10641-022-01244-6
Outside of Menerbes, France, is the Corkscrew Museum. It is a place that elevates and celebrates a seemingly mundane tool as a work of art and innovation. There I learned about the ZigZag corkscrew and its inventor, Jules Bart. Bart was a French World War I veteran who was a Ron Popeal-like figure of kitchen gadgetry in early to mid-20th century France. He developed the ZigZag corkscrew while in a German prisoner of war camp.
http://tire-bouchons.blogspot.com/2019/07/le-tire-bouchon-zig-zag-de-jules-bart.html. (You can use Chromes auto-translate feature to read this in English.)
I also learned that corkscrew collecting is a thing. Here is a 2005 Washington Post article (warning - filled with terrible puns).
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/2005/01/16/corkscrew-connoisseur/20cbba24-34ae-446f-bc23-a232d9c3e884/
Clean hands and sharp minds,
Adam
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