It's happening ... the clean energy transition

California hit 100 days this year with 100% carbon-free electricity for at least a part of each day — a big clean energy milestone. 

And it's happening with only the most concerned and attentive citizens talking about it.

David Kurtz laments:

Climate change got short shrift in the [Harris/Trump] debate, a single question framed in the most unsophisticated, open-ended way:

The question to you both tonight is what would you do to fight climate change? And Vice President Harris, we’ll start with you. One minute for you each.

It’s a measure of the degraded state of our public discourse about climate change that the debate question would be so general and non-specific – with an entire 60 seconds to respond.

But maybe that's just how it has to take place. What is happening is just too novel, too fast, for most of us and our information systems to assimilate. 

Bill McKibben, prophet of both climate doom and climate hope, has lots more. 

Statistics numb the brain so let me say it another way: we are on the cusp of a true explosion that could change the world. We are starting to put out the fires that humans have always relied on, and replace them with the power of the sun.

... Bloomberg predicted last week that global installations of new solar modules would hit 592 gigawatts this year—up 33 percent from last year. The point is, when you’re doing this a few years in a row the totals start to grow very very fast. When something that provides one percent of your electricity doubles to two percent, that doesn’t mean much—but when something that supplies ten or twenty percent goes up by a third that’s actually quite a lot. And more the next year. 

... That is, the use of natural gas to generate electricity has dropped by almost a third in one year in the fifth largest economy in the world. In 2023, fossil gas provided 23% more electricity to the grid than solar in that six month period. In 2024, those numbers were almost perfectly reversed: solar provided 24 percent more electricity than fossil gas, 39,865 GWh v 24,033 GWh. In one year. That’s how this kind of s-curve exponential growth works, and how it could work everywhere on earth,  

For McKibben, this is how the election matters: 

... if Trump wins, there’s tons that he can do to slow the transition down. He can’t “kill wind,” as he has promised. But he can make it impossible for it to keep growing at the same rate—right now there are teams in the White House managing every single big renewable project, trying to lower the regulatory hurdles that get in the way of new transmission lines, for instance. A Trump White House will have similar teams, just operating in reverse.

Again, he can’t hold it off forever—economics insures that cheap power will eventually win out.

But eventually doesn’t help here, not with the poles melting fast. We desperately need clean energy now. That’s what this election is about—will Big Oil get the obstacle it desperately desires, or will change continue to play out—hopefully with a big boost from the climate movement for even faster progress.

The bold type here is McKibben's except in that last paragraph. We citizens are not focused on climate and energy; for most of us, it's all just too big and too scary to contemplate. But it's happening; this election will help determine how fast and even, perhaps, how equitably.

A miscellany of British museums

What did we do in England for the month of July? In addition to crewing on a narrowboat and hiking in the Lake Country, we visited museums. Here are a few of them:

The best, or at least most rewarding, first: the Imperial War Museum outside Manchester. I've wanted to visit one of the IWM's three locations for years. The visit was totally worth our time; we did it by tram from the boat. This charitable foundation shares not just stories of wartime heroism and sacrifices, of massive social upheavals, but also asks the questions and highlights the misgivings raised by Europe's spasms of 20th century barbarism. 

• • •

Also in Manchester, we visited the Science and Industry Museum which recounts, celebrates, and interrogates the history of the first modern industrial city. Erudite Partner was mainly excited by the historic cotton looms; she's a weaver. I was gripped by seeing this earl 20th century Linotype machine on display; in the early 1970s when I worked on the Catholic Worker newspaper, we went to press from a shop that used just such a set up; their real business was printing Variety, but they made room for us. Typesetting consisted of a skilled printing professional typing out lead lugs for each line of print from such a mechanism. The machines, arrayed in a long line, were deafening.

I sat in on a class which instructed 8 year olds about the industrial and scientific accomplishments of their city. They were enthusiastic.

• • •

 

On the  Liverpool docks, we visited the International Slavery Museum. I got the impression of a facility trying to find its footing. On the one hand, the museum makes very clear how the trade in human chattel formed the city, its economy, and its residents.

 

But the museum seems to be struggling to give voice to what enslavement meant in the lives of the enslaved people. A work in progress?

• • •

In Sheffield, we were impressed by the Kelham Island Museum which documents the industrial accomplishments of the city, particularly in steel fabrication. Among these, the prototype of the modern water closet.

Sheffield is a city whose prosperity is rooted in steel fabrication, so it is not surprising that its Anglican cathedral features this steel nativity scene by Brian Fell.

We had a great time, away from the local lunacy. There are few joys to equal learning about new places and people!

Humanity's terrible warning shot against itself

This weekend is the 77th anniversary of the U.S. dropping the first atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 

We don't usually live in daily terror of The Bomb these days, though maybe we should.

We've been reminded this week that we (most immediately Ukrainians and other Europeans) live in danger of explosive nuclear discharge as Russia and Ukraine trade artillery blasts in the vicinity of Europe's largest nuclear power plant at Zaporizhzhia. The plant has been occupied by invading Russians but is still run by its Ukrainian technicians. When it comes to blowing up a nuke plant, who is at fault is less important than just not taking the risk!

Meanwhile in Japan, citizens observe the terrible anniversary. In the memory of ultimate terror, quiet and prayer seem what is left to humanity. 

Even after the war against fascism in Europe and the even more brutal race war in the Pacific, there were voices in the United States that cried out against the news of The Bomb. 

Here's what Dwight MacDonald wrote on August 9, 1945:

At 9.15 on the morning of August 6, 1945, an American plane dropped a single bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Ex­ploding with the force of 20,000 tons of TNT, The Bomb destroyed in a twinkling two-thirds of the city, including, presumably, most of the 343,000 human beings who lived there. No warning was given. This atrocious action places “ us” , the defenders of civilization, on a moral level with “them” , the beasts of Maidanek. And “we”, the American people, are just as much and as little responsible for this horror as “they", the German people.  

So much is obvious. But more must be said. For the “atomic” bomb renders anticlimactical even the ending of the greatest war in history.  

(1) The concepts, “war” and “progress”, are now obsolete. Both suggest human aspirations, emotions, aims, consciousness. “The greatest achievement of organized science in history,” said President Truman after the Hiroshima catastrophe—which it probably was, and so much the worse for organized science.  

(2) The futility of modern warfare should now be clear. Must we not now conclude, with Simone Weil, that the technical aspect of war today is the evil, regardless of political factors? Can one imagine that The Bomb could ever be used “in a good cause” ? Do not such means instantly, of themselves, corrupt any cause?  

(3) The bomb is the natural product of the kind of society we have created. It is as easy, normal, and unforced an expression of the American Way of Life as electric ice-boxes, banana splits, and hydromatic-drive automobiles. We do not dream of a world in which atomic fission will be “harnessed to constructive ends”. The new energy will be at the service of the rulers; it will change their strength but not their aims. The underlying populations should regard this new source of energy with lively interest— the interest of victims.  

(4) Those who wield such destructive power are outcasts from humanity. They may be gods, they may be brutes, but they are not men.  

(5) We must “get” the national State before it “gets” us. Every individual who wants to save his humanity— and indeed his skin— had better begin thinking “dangerous thoughts” about sabotage, resistance, rebellion, and the fraternity of all men everywhere. The mental attitude known as “negativism” is a good start.

Some of this has not aged well. But most has. There are truths that war-ravaged people knew in 1945 that we may have forgotten.

The GOP is killing its own base among old people

This isn't about vaccine-rejection and anti-masking hysteria. This was pre-COVID:

In this national analysis [from the BMJ - a peer reviewed publication from the trade union of the British Medical Association], we found that Americans living in counties that voted Democratic during presidential elections from 2000 to 2016 experienced lower age adjusted mortality rates (AAMRs) than residents of counties that voted for a Republican candidate, and these patterns were consistent across subgroups (sex, race and ethnicity, urban-rural location). The gap in overall AAMR between Democratic and Republican counties increased more than sixfold from 2001 to 2019, driven primarily by changes in deaths due to heart disease, cancer, lower respiratory tract diseases, unintentional injuries, and suicide.

Click to enlarge

 "Unintentional injuries" is a euphemism for opioid deaths.

It's not so much that old Republicans were dying of different causes than old Democrats -- both were mostly afflicted by heart disease, cancer, and cardio-vascular ailments. But Democratic counties did a better job of reducing mortality among their old people, based on such factors as Medicaid expansion (access to health insurance coverage), stronger tobacco and gun control, and more generous social welfare systems in general.

It does seem counter-productive -- no, ghoulish -- for a political party to cooperate in killing off its supporters.

H/t commenters at Emptywheel.

What are the science nerds going to come up with next?

On the indispensable Popular Information substack, Judd Legum and friends report that an awful lot of corporate pledges to work toward "net zero" deserve Zero Credibility.

Corporations want the public to know that they take the climate crisis seriously. Most major corporations have taken a public "climate pledge," promising to reach "net zero" carbon emissions by a future date. ... As a concept, climate pledges are appealing. ... there is no "sustainable" rate of CO2 emissions. By pledging to reach "net zero" emissions by 2040 or earlier, corporations are aligning their companies with science. ...

The NewClimate Institute recently released a report that evaluates the climate pledges of 25 multinational corporations. The results are not encouraging. Specifically, while all 25 companies have pledged to reach "net zero," they've collectively made specific commitments to reduce just 20% of their current carbon footprint by 2040. 12 of the 25 companies have made no specific carbon emissions reductions whatsoever.

Maybe all this corporate feel-good posturing will do some good. In the struggle toward a sustainable climate, every little reduction in fossil fuel pollution helps -- a little. It's probable that these pledges can give climate hawks additional angles from which to goose the corporate behemoths to do better.

But it also seems possible that techno innovators are making strides which might change the sustainability arena. We've come to understand that to keep warming caused by CO2 under limits, we need to Electrify Everything. If we're to switch from coal and gas to renewable power from sun and wind, we need sustainable technology to electrify. We need new, bigger, and different batteries.

Here's a battery innovation story that's more than feel-good posturing.

 

No more mining rare earths in the Congo with slave labor for these guys. There's innovation here that just might work out.

There are more things on heaven and earth ...

... than we imagine or pause to notice.

Pyroaerobiology is being built by people following their curiosities.

These women wondered and found delight. Well worth a few minutes of your life.

Friday cat blogging

Portrait of Janeway at her most dignified.

Thanks to Christopher Ingraham who writes a delightful Substack called The Why Axis, I've learned that which animals we choose to live with carries political meaning -- maybe.

... while dogs are more popular overall, liberals are disproportionately likely to own cats, while conservatives tend to be dog people. There’s been some debate over what’s behind the split — urban/rural differences? Household income? Gender?

New peer-reviewed research points to another cause: conservatives hold strong anti-cat biases, likely stemming from cats’ disregard for social hierarchies, their general lack of loyalty, and their refusal to submit to authority. Those characteristics are at odds with certain principles conservatives tend to hold dear.

Apologies to the researchers who put out this stuff (the linked study seems to implicate UC Press) but I found it hard to tell whether I was reading satire. Somehow elaborate statistical data analysis seems overkill.

But what politics, if any, do cats prefer in their servants? Now there's a proper research question.

Why won't they get their shots?

Most of us know someone who insists they won't get the coronavirus vaccine. As the number of unvaccinated persons shrinks, thanks to persistent persuasion and broader mandates, the sort of refusers I least understand are the hippie health nuts. Why would these nice, inoffensive folks be joining hard core libertarians protesting mask mandates and free shots? Eva Wiseman found such a person to profile in The dark side of wellness: the overlap between spiritual thinking and far-right conspiracies. The story is enlightening.

Melissa Rein Lively had always thought of herself as a spiritual person. Her interests were grounded in “wellness, natural health, organic food”, she lists for me today from her home in Arizona, “yoga, ayurvedic healing, meditation, etc.” When the pandemic hit she started spending more time online, on wellness sites that offered affirmations, recipes and, on health, the repeated message to “Do your research.” She’d click on a video of foods that boost immunity and she’d see a clip about the dangers of vaccines. ... 

“Much of what I read took a hard stance against the pharmaceutical industry and western medical philosophy, and was particularly critical of individuals like Bill Gates, who seemed to have an incredible amount of influence and involvement in public health policy,” continues Rein Lively. At first, she enjoyed what she was reading. She liked learning. She liked the community. She liked the idea that there were patriots in the government who were working quietly to help save the world. But as she clicked on and read about imminent genocide under the guise of a health crisis, she felt herself changing. ... 

She was becoming convinced that nothing was really what it seemed; that there was a carefully constructed narrative being told, which was designed to control society. “I was willing to expand my thinking and consider a completely alternative theory, especially during a time of unprecedented chaos. What if nothing was what it seemed?” It was shocking, she says, and horrifying, and also, “Oddly comforting. What I had felt I knew was true, and others knew the same thing. ..."

Ms. Lively eventually suffered a very public cognitive explosion in a Target store where she attacked an array of masks -- a performance which, because she possessed the cash to obtain real help, caused her to be hospitalized for a mental health intervention. This nudged her back into consensus reality. She's brave to tell her story.

Dr. Timothy Caulfield studies pseudoscience enthusiasms. He explains:

“There is a strong correlation between the embrace of ‘wellness woo’ and being susceptible to misinformation. And as conspiracy theories and misinformation become increasingly about ideology, it becomes easier to sell both wellness bunk and conspiracy theories as being ‘on brand.’ In other words, if you are part of our community, this is the cluster of beliefs you must embrace – Big Science is evil, supplements help, you can boost your immune system, vaccines don’t work…”

Selling pseudo-spirituality, pseudo-health products, and COVID misinformation in a New Age-ish package is good business for unscrupulous entrepreneurs. And for unscrupulous politicians.

• • •

Wiseman pointed me to a TikTok influencer, Abbie Richards, whose schematic presentation of a hierarchy of conspiracy theorizing is brilliant, funny, and scary all at once. I'm not a TikTok person, but here's Richards on YouTube. Enjoy.

Many of these deaths were preventable

Charles Gaba is a progressive data nerd. Back in 2013, when it was hard to find consistent, reliable reporting of enrollment data for the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), he started compiling the information and publishing it at ACAsignups.net. 

In the last month, Gaba has put together a series of charts showing the correlation between the prevalence of COVID deaths with the percentages of state votes for Donald Trump. The result is one of the most depressing things I've seen in a long time.

Back at the beginning of the pandemic, the highest death rates were in blue states with big cities. But not anymore.

Click to enlarge.

Donald Trump and his Republican minions -- who are leading the MAGA crowd in rejecting masks and vaccines -- are literally killing people.Vaccination is available to nearly everyone over 12.  Vaccinations may not prevent all infections, but they do prevent almost all deaths. Yet the death rate in Trump-voting counties is nearly twice that in the most blue-voting counties. 

There's a level of malevolence in this that's hard to fathom.

Crawling out of the bog ...

The National Center for Science Education reports that a majority of us seem to have firmly recognized that evolution is a fact.

“From 1985 to 2010, there was a statistical dead heat between acceptance and rejection of evolution,” commented lead researcher Jon D. Miller of the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan. “But acceptance then surged, becoming the majority position in 2016.”

2016 -- the year the know-nothings seized a national political party and imposed their bottom-feeding swamp critter. And the year many of us had to let go a deadly complacency.  

It ain't over. The struggle continues. There are many more perils ahead. But I like the trend.

COVID-19 doesn't do borders. We must vaccinate the world.

Over the weekend, I was talking with a friend in Nicaragua. Several of us on the call reported that we had received our vaccinations. We asked, "how's it going there?"

He replied that there didn't seem to be any organized effort from the state to get people shots -- maybe the country of 6 million had inoculated 3000 people. He didn't know where they'd been getting the vaccine -- it was a discussion that was so remote from his reality that he seemed not to have much thought about it.

What came to my mind immediately was that, if Nicaragua and other poor Latin American countries were ever going to get vaccines, they would probably be looking to Cuba. Cuba has historically shared medical resources with Nicaragua. The Caribbean island has a developed biotech industry and a history of assisting other impoverished nations.

And so I wasn't surprised to run across this from the Washington Post:

Cuban leader Fidel Castro vowed to build a biotech juggernaut in the Caribbean, advancing the idea in the early 1980s with six researchers in a tiny Havana lab. Forty years later, the communist island nation could be on the cusp of a singular breakthrough: Becoming the world’s smallest country to develop not just one, but multiple coronavirus vaccines. 

... Cuban officials say they’re developing cheap and easy-to-store serums. They are able to last at room temperature for weeks, and in long-term storage as high as 46.4 degrees, potentially making them a viable option for low-income, tropical countries that have been pushed aside by bigger, wealthier nations in the international scrum for coronavirus vaccines. 

They could also make Cuba the pharmacist for nations lumped by Washington into the “Axis of Evil” and “Troika of Tyranny.” Iran and Venezuela have inked vaccine deals with Havana. Iran has agreed to host a Phase 3 trial of one of Cuba’s most promising candidates — Soberana 2 — as part of a technology transfer agreement that could see millions of doses manufactured in Iran. ...

This article treats Cuba as an unreconstructed authoritarian hell-hole. Now there's certainly plenty wrong with Cuba for Cubans. But let's credit the Cuban project with understanding that health care is a right, not a commodity. We in the United States have nothing to brag about while we defend the patents held by rich world pharmaceutical companies against the international effort to make life-saving shots cheap and accessible around the world. 

Meanwhile scientists with a big picture view warn that rich world indifference and corporate greed might mean that mutations render the first wave of coronavirus vaccines obsolete within a year if we're too cheap to make sure protection reaches everyone, everywhere.

The grim forecast of a year or less comes from two-thirds of respondents, according to the People’s Vaccine Alliance, a coalition of organisations including Amnesty International, Oxfam, and UNAIDS, who carried out the survey of 77 scientists from 28 countries. Nearly one-third of the respondents indicated that the time-frame was likely nine months or less. 

Persistent low vaccine coverage in many countries would make it more likely for vaccine-resistant mutations to appear, said 88% of the respondents, who work across illustrious institutions such as Johns Hopkins, Yale, Imperial College, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and the University of Edinburgh. 

“New mutations arise every day. Sometimes they find a niche that makes them more fit than their predecessors. These lucky variants could transmit more efficiently and potentially evade immune responses to previous strains,” said Gregg Gonsalves, associate professor of epidemiology at Yale University, in a statement. 

“Unless we vaccinate the world, we leave the playing field open to more and more mutations, which could churn out variants that could evade our current vaccines and require booster shots to deal with them.”

No easy answers

As I wait for the electrician, here's a quick take on the frustration I feel when thinking about nuclear power.

The mantra of the best folks working to reduce carbon emissions by ending our dependence on fossil fuels these days is "Electrify Everything!" Insofar as I can understand, this seems believable as a strategy to mitigate the climate change we're living.

But, for many of these climate hawks, Electrify Everything! includes not only extending the life of existing nuclear plants, but also building new ones, perhaps smaller and more numerous.

And I'm open to the idea that our engineers may have learned a lot from 75 years of managing nuclear energy and 50 years of building and running power plants. Experience does lead to improvements. 

But when I encounter these discussions that insist on the necessity of nuclear power, I always try to interject the question -- what are we going to do with the radioactive waste? These plants throw off materials that will be dangerous to life for thousands of years. What are we going to do with this stuff?

This brings me to the random article I ran across this morning in the Washington Post:

A decade after Fukushima nuclear disaster, contaminated water symbolizes Japan’s struggles 

Ten years ago, three power reactors on the Japanese coast melted down when hit by a tsunami. Heroic workers managed to contain much of the nuclear material released but

more than 1,000 huge metal tanks loom in silent testament to one of the worst nuclear disasters in history...

The tanks contain nearly 1.25 million tons of cooling water from the 2011 disaster and groundwater seepage over the years — equivalent to around 500 Olympic-size swimming pools — most of it still dangerously radioactive.

The power company that owns the disaster site says this contaminated water can be treated and released into the ocean. Or at least most of the hazardous nuclear isotopes can be removed. If they do it right and patiently. Not surprisingly, given the damage that their industry has already suffered as a consequence of the accident, people who work in fishing off Japan and South Korea are doubtful.

And scientists not tied to the power companies maintain that a pledge to eliminate all the extremely radioactive corium from the waste is a lie, given that "the technology to do so doesn’t yet exist."

There are tremendous incentives to trust that we can push the question into some future of how to truly remove the radioactive waste we generate while replacing fossil fuels with nuclear. But the track record is not reassuring.

Let's hope smart engineers and governments can do better on this without poisoning people who become sacrifices to progress.

Generosity

A decade ago, diligent journalistic digging brought to light the hidden story of how researchers at John Hopkins University had appropriated unusual cancer cells taken from a poor Black Baltimore woman, Henrietta Lacks. They used these in cancer and other studies, without meaningful consent or compensation to Lacks or her surviving family. She died of her disease; her cells, named HeLa by the doctors, lived on in medical research.

The story of this unexamined appropriation of a woman's body parts for science and profit raised up profound failures of scientific and medical ethics. Lacks' descendants eventually won some compensation; the journalist, Rebecca Skloot, founded the Henrietta Lacks Foundation which has used its funds to provide grants to poor people of color who are survivors of medical exploitation.

The Foundation mission statement:

to promote public discourse concerning the role that contributions of biological materials play in scientific research and disease prevention, as well as issues related to consent, and disparities in access to health care and research benefits, particularly for minorities and underserved communities.

In this time of coronavirus threat, the Lacks family has stepped out to encourage vaccinations, despite their own history with medical exploitation. Nobody knows better that doctors sometimes aren't your friends -- and nobody knows better that if medical help becomes available, it's good to get some.

We need to hunker down

That huge black bubble over California representing current hospitalizations is properly alarming in this depiction from the COVID Tracking Project. The coronavirus is thriving among us.

Mission Local passed along a video exploring why new COVID cases took off after mid-October in San Francisco as authorities relaxed precautions.

According to Phoenix Data Project:

This data reveals that although San Francisco was doing relatively well controlling the pandemic, when indoor dining opened and cases numbers increased, SF made its big mistake. By not reversing reopening plans, ICU and case numbers increased, and SF experienced a large holiday surge.

Stay safe out there ...

Vaccine delight and other concerns

Dr. Jane Jenab displays her vaccination record.

She is an ER doc who has been treating COVID patients for months. Her relief is profound:

I won’t lie, I teared up several times on the way to the hospital, and definitely shed a tear during the actual vaccination. So incredibly relieved. I’ve been holding on by my fingernails to make it through until we had a vaccine, and now we do. It’s hard to express how grateful I am. Hopefully I will live to continue to serve my fellow humans for a whole lot longer now.

There has been so much darkness and so much death this year. There have been so many days when I have struggled to find any semblance of hope. Today, there is hope. We have lost over 300,000 Americans, including countless healthcare workers. For all those who didn’t make it to see this day, we will carry on, carry the torch, and keep fighting the fight. Thank you to the scientists who have brought us these vaccines. My fervent hope is that everyone has access to them soon. Onward, friends. I can now see the light at the end of the tunnel.

... For those who have asked about side effects from the vaccine, I am about 24 hours out from my injection and so far, I have some mild soreness at the injection site and in the deltoid muscle, similar to tetanus shots in the past. Otherwise, I feel perfectly fine.

Another friend works in a hospital. News that she is eligible for one of the first batch of doses forced her to ponder the justice of vaccine allocations.

WE'RE GETTING THE VACCINE TOMORROW!!!! Shot 1/2. ... I am so freaking excited - and grateful. Also, I feel a little guilty about it. I mean, the system just isn't sophisticated enough to make sure that risk/vulnerability is calculated precisely ... I'm "just" a chaplain - I'm behind nurses and doctors and many others in line, which is as it should be. I'm ahead of people who sit at desks, which is also as it should be.

I am in the hospital 4 days a week, seeing (presumably!) non-COVID patients all the time and entering a COVID room about once a week, and meeting with immediate family of COVID patients usually multiple times a week and I'll be honest, I don't feel 100% confident in the screening, in terms of what their exposure is etc. See? I feel guilty enough to talk through my justification for getting this! But anyway - my only choice here is to opt in or out. I'm opting in with tremendous enthusiasm and gratitude!!!!!

 I shared my own concerns about the vaccine priority list previously. I'll get the shot when Kaiser gets around to me, which will be awhile.

We know the Trump administration has broken the bureaucracy's capacity to distribute this life saving intervention fairly and efficiently. We know that rich people and powerful people will find ways to jump the line. Distibution is going to be a train wreck. And still -- we can be amazed and delighted that hope for protection from infection is finally on the way.

Exponential growth in action

My long time running friend Ollie is a mathematician. He looks at the coronavirus pandemic though his particular expertise, readily warning that "my field is mathematics, NOT infectious diseases so if I err, I do not mind correction from a credentialed person. In fact, I encourage it." My emphasis added to his observations that follow.

1. Whether you get infected with COVID or not depends on many factors and is probabilistic; we can say "highly likely" or "not likely" but never "certainly".

Your likelihood of getting infected depends on your level of exposure; that is, the dose of the virus in a short amount of time. A few individual viruses are unlikely to infect you.

The dose you get depends on several things: how close you are to the infected person, how long, and what protective gear you have.

A mask basically mitigates the tiny droplets that transport the virus. It is most effective when worn by the infected person, as the virus density is highest on what comes out of their noses and mouths.

The mask is less effective, but still far more protective than nothing, on the non-infected person.  

Masks might not stop all of the virus from entering, but it does lower the dose by quite a bit thereby lowering the risk of infection. 

Yes, the mesh of the mask is larger than the size of the virus; what it does, though, is stop many of the water droplets that carry the virus. It is transportation interdiction.  

The strength of the dose of virus depends on the quality of the air circulation and how close you are to someone who is infected. (inverse square law, plus the droplets carrying the virus tend to drop.  

That is why social distancing is important. 

2. Yes, you can be totally irresponsible and probably get away with it; the probability of infection at any single incident is low. But repetition matters and eventually your luck may well run out. It is a bit like rolling a 360 sided dice; your chances of getting a single given number is low on any one roll, but if you roll it enough times, it will probably appear once ... though you can't say when. 

3. The virus doesn't care about your cause, your emotional needs, if it is "just family", that you prayed to your deity for protection, etc. It is all governed by ice cold laws of probability.  

4. Yes, the survival rate for most classes of individuals is high. But there are two other factors: 

1. Something like 10 percent of verified cases end up in the hospital and even those not hospitalized end up with ill effects for weeks to months afterward. 

2. Even worse, the virus can spread through you and infect someone who might be more prone to dying from it. That is exponential growth in action.

Nobody in the White House seems capable of this sort of scientific reflection, most especially the super-spreader-in-chief.

Stop with the whining ...

Maybe if I were a better Christian I would forgo offering this take -- but after mulling it over, I'm not that good.

The Roman Catholic archbishop of San Francisco and some of his flock are acting like whining cry babies over being barred by secular authorities from holding super-spreader events in their churches. I too am a eucharistic Christian -- I believe I am fed in the spirit when I partake in the communal meal that mysteriously is Jesus' body and blood offered to the gathered faithful (and even the merely confused). Communion is good for my soul. I miss not being able to have it during this pandemic time.

But I am also an adult Christian. I believe we are called to live not just for ourselves, and for our own desires, but for all the people among whom we live. And the scientists tell us that indoor church is probably a uniquely dangerous environment for this infectious disease -- people come close together for extended periods, they pray aloud, they sing -- all risks. And then they take their risks home to those they live with. Bars may be worse, but church is bad.

I'm not saying that churches are always called to bow to the dictates of secular authorities. Far from it. Faith may require resistance rooted in conscience on a range of matters. But I do not understand weighing postponement of communal practice which conflicts with public health among the deep issues of that should stir conscience. I worry far more about kids in cages and the federal government's renewed rush to carry out executions.  

I understand the archbishop feels put upon, planted here to serve in a city that is oblivious to his high opinion of the authority invested in him by his church. Even most Roman Catholics don't look to clerics to govern their consciences.

I think our Congresscritter, that faithful Roman Catholic Nancy Pelosi, said it best:

“I believe that science is an answer to our prayers,” Pelosi said. “It is a creation of God and one that is an answer to our prayers.”

In God's good time, assisted by our best human efforts against the virus, churches will fully reopen. Meanwhile, Mr. Archbishop, deal with the terrain set before you.

Thanks Donald!

Your incompetent response to the coronavirus has turned 60 percent of us into anti-vaxxers. That took some doing. Most of us knew at least vaguely we were glad to be living in a world without polio or smallpox thanks to vaccines until you came along and raised up the stupid.

Your handling of the SARS-CoV-2 epidemic has been nothing but ignorant and venal. It's clear that you are either incapable or unwilling to understand the toll of COVID. Your interest in a preventative vaccine seems almost entirely about enhancing your own glory.

I don't know whether something you've labeled "Operation Warp Speed" can rapidly produce a safe and effective vaccine that I'd trust. "Warp Speed" is great in fiction, but careful science gets it done and you are devoid of acquaintance with either care or science.

This injury to our trust in science will have lasting consequences beyond the coronavirus -- even if we somehow don't see 300,000 U.S. deaths by the end of this year. Responding to human-induced climate change will require the best of our human analytical faculties -- which are organized and empowered as science.

This was preventable.

Dangerous drivel

Notoriously, the pathological toddler in the White House has again been hyping the unproven and dangerous drug hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for the coronavirus. On Monday, his dopey son tweeted an endorsement; Twitter scrubbed the lie and locked Jr.'s account for 12 hours. So Daddy started passing around the same phony medical endorsement.

A friend, a doctor "too exhausted actually taking care of sick COVID patients to type it out," passed on this rebuttal to the Trumps from yet another working doctor.

"Even doctors can spread misinformation, and despite the claims, there are numerous studies showing lack of efficacy even when used early on. That's why we created a process to sift good information from the bad in an objective manner.

"You can always find outliers. What do the MAJORITY of credible doctors and scientists say. Just b/c the far right trots out a handful of scientists who deny global warming doesn't mean we aren't all in a slow cooker.

"Also, if a doctor says he knows his cures work bc others doctors tried it and told him so, then scoffs at double blinded randomized studies, rest assured you are not getting good information. Anecdotal evidence is as useful as a monkey's fart.

"Just because your great aunt Tandy once plastered onion to your 3rd cousins feet and cured his syphylis does not mean everyone needs to run out and buy onion flip flops. There are doctors going around claiming they are curing covid with hydroxychloroquine, zinc and azithromycin.

"Please remember MOST people will get better with nothing, just like MOST people recover from the flu. The fact that you drank a tequila and wheat grass shot 3 times a day does not mean it was a "cure" for the flu."

The Daily Beast reveals some background on Trump's new favorite source of medical misinformation.

"Before Trump and his supporters embrace [Dr. Stella] Immanuel’s medical expertise, though, they should consider other medical claims Immanuel has made—including those about alien DNA and the physical effects of having sex with witches and demons in your dreams. ...

"She alleges alien DNA is currently used in medical treatments, and that scientists are cooking up a vaccine to prevent people from being religious. And, despite appearing in Washington, D.C. to lobby Congress on Monday, she has said that the government is run in part not by humans but by “reptilians” and other aliens."

Just the sort of quackery you'd expect Trump to embrace. No wonder he has been worse than useless to the people of his country as we endure preventable sickness and death. He's bored with COVID.

COVID-19: what don't we know yet about recovering

Health policy wonk Andy Slavitt warned about a coming spike in COVID cases where states "opened" too soon. The virus doesn't care about governors' political need to placate Donald Trump and his combative followers; it simply marches on through new, previously uninfected, hosts wherever it can find them. Unhappily, at the moment, that's Florida, Texas, and Arizona, with the rest of the south and southwest apparently on the same path.

Now Slavitt is warning about future dangers. Most people who catch COVID don't die; they "recover." But because the disease is new to humans, we don't know what "recover" means. Slavitt wants our medical scientists to get ahead of the game, to study outcomes so doctors know what to expect.

It is time we consider setting up COVID-19 long term recovery centers so patients with ongoing mysterious symptoms can be treated and studied.

The symptoms that emerge post-hospitalization or among many younger people with initial light symptoms is a scary and not understood part of the disease.

More people will survive COVID but like past viruses like SARS-Cov-1 and AIDS, surviving doesn’t mean a symptom free life.

We can eventually beat and treat many diseases but our scientists need data and patients require support.

One out of 1000 Americans at this point have been hospitalized with COVID-19. Neurological, respiratory, immune system, and clotting and damage to the kidney, pancreas and lungs have all been experienced.

As the virus spreads more people will become ill and more will survive. We should take advantage of the time to increase our understanding.

Many more people will get COVID and not require hospitalization — by the end of the Summer, it could total 15% of the population.

Some number of these people, even if they didn’t experience symptoms, will find the virus has stayed in their system causing new or nagging sensations. With SARS-Cov-1, chronic fatigue & mental health disorders are still a problem with 40% of people who have recovered.

The answer to this phenomenon begins with more widespread testing still. And in particular in hard hit communities.

Special clinics and ongoing treatment should be set up.

Some COVID recoverees report being stigmatized already as we often do with things we don’t understand. People treat them as if they’re infectious. And suggest the only thing that matters is if people die or not. We can do better than that.

Normally the CDC would be enlightening us here. I hope they step up but since the pandemic has begun, leadership has had to come from elsewhere in the country. And it should again.

That is, we need more and better data collection and smart observation from a scientific community that is both over-burdened and sometimes prone to squabbling over credit for new insights. Only coherent political leadership could avert the worse of this. And we know we're not going to get it in this country.

This was preventable.

Tile mural detail above by Juana Alicia outside the Ambulatory Care Center, UCSF Medical Center.