Not completely, one regular in China has even posted in this thread, though I’m not sure if they’d be comfortable giving regular updates.
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One dose of an mRNA vaccine is also better than nothing, if a second is not possible for some reason
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Communication is still key.
How can anyone still understand the decision of even the EMA does not support it ?
EMA sees ‘no evidence’ to restrict AstraZeneca vaccine
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I’ll be damned. Not at all surprised that she got it, but I am a bit taken aback that her advice to the public is… not insane?
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A rational voice? Maybe a 13-month late voice.
YMMV.
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As someone with asthma, who simply cannot keep a cloth mask on my face for more than ninety seconds, [un]fuck those people!
I’ve spent the past year wearing an actual fucking respirator because I can’t wear a regular mask without being convinced that I’m suffocating. But that doesn’t exempt me from jack shit, it just means I need to figure out what I am able to do, and then do that thing.
Since when did “But it’s inconvenient!” become America’s Get-Out-Of-All-Responsibility Card?
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Pretty much always? For everybody else, it never was.
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'Murica! Oh, wait…
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Awful. Sad. Scary.
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As was predicted, the 3rd wave is upon us with exponential vengeance and, as widely expected, our 
Ontario provincial government waffled “studied the issue” for weeks and, as widely leaked to the press this week… Welcome back to lock-down, Ontario… again…
In a stellar flourish of right-wing style during the press conference, Premier Ford blamed patio-goers, church attendees, local mayors, vaccine delivery delays, out of country arrivals and out-of-area shoppers for the debacle… all before drawing a second breath.
Schools are excepted from the lock-down; the track record from last time they did that was that it was correlated with success, and we can’t have that again, can we? /s
I think we’ll be keeping our kids in on-line classes for a bit anyhow.
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I wonder how much of that is reporting catching up, a la Mexico.
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A member of the Legislative Assembly of the State of São Paulo, Representative Gil Diniz, who forbade the use of a mask in his office, had Covid and spent 3 days in the ICU in São Paulo.
“Being in an ICU is terrible,” said the parliamentarian, after confirming admission to Hospital Santa Marcelina for 7 days in March.
“I never denied the virus itself, but the experience leads us to empathize with others,” he said, thanking for prayers.
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And yet there are a lot of people who think these numbers were manipulated or they are just fake news.
In this article, some of the survivors talk about the loss of their relatives and loved ones.
A public service announcement to raise awareness on covid 19. The song is called “Naquela Mesa está faltando Ele”, a song about a son who miss his father, who isn´t present at the meals anymore. It is such a very sad and powerful message.
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The company responsible has a shady history and stranglehold on the US anthrax vaccination stores.
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Something I get to start thinking about on April 30th!
Peeling Back Layers of Fear and Hyper-Caution
By Josh Marshall | April 1, 2021 4:31 p.m.
Yesterday was two weeks after I got my second dose of the Pfizer vaccine, the first day I was officially immune from COVID, or as immune as an mRNA vaccine gets you. Obviously vaccinated people still get COVID, though serious or fatal cases are extremely rare, almost to the point of non-existence, according to the latest data. Two additional studies have been released over the last week: one a batch of follow-on trial data from Pfizer which places the vaccine’s efficacy just over 90%; another from the CDC, probably more consequential, suggests the vaccine is almost as effective against infection as it is against disease. But for the moment, whatever the latest science says, I’m as vaccinated as you get.
Expand the full article.
My family and I have been very ‘tight’ when it comes to COVID. On the spectrum of mitigation we’ve leaned strongly to the side of caution. Still though I go to the pharmacy to pick up medicines, to the grocery to get food, for the occasional outdoor dining. But each time it’s not only masked or now double-masked, it’s with a persistent consciousness of vulnerability and a general imperative to limit my time indoors with people I don’t know as much as possible. Do what I need to do and get back to the relative safety and isolation of my home.
So yesterday I did something that is specific to me and my interests: I went out to buy wood. I bought a lot of it. Many of you know that woodworking is a big interest of mine, close to entirely with hand tools and mostly what’s described as ‘fine’ woodworking or cabinetry. Some of the wood I get for projects is hardwood which I purchase from specialty vendors. But I do a lot of projects in simple ‘select’ grade pine or even construction lumber. You can get this at your local big box store. But to do so you’ve got to work your way through a lot of wood to find quality boards. Big box store lumber is dented, chipped, bowed, cupped. You need to pick your way through the inventory and that takes time. A lot of time. You simply can’t do it if you’re feeling like you should be minimizing your time in the aisle, stacking and unstacking, looking longways to look for straightness, wetness, resin. You need to feel like there’s no rush and you can take all the time you need. To find boards that are just right takes time.
During the long summer lull when case numbers were extremely low in the Greater New York region I did some of this. But quickly. In, out. When numbers started to surge again in the Fall I stopped. When I needed more lumber I ordered it for delivery. But when you order lumber from a big box store for the things I use it for you’re lucky to be able to use half of it.
When I made this small set of shop drawers a couple weeks ago I spent a good deal of time hand planing the pieces to as flat as I could get them because what I got delivered was so cupped and warped. But it still wasn’t enough. There’s a nasty crack just out of view from needing to coax and force the warped boards into alignment. I’m still annoyed.
After getting to the store I went first to pick out pine boards. Unstack them. Find ones that look clean. Eyeball the length for warping and the width to see if they’re cupped or bowed. How dry do they feel? How resiny? Pick out some good ones, stack back the rest. Pick a range of sizes general enough to cut or laminate into almost any size I might need.
Pine is a wonderful, under-appreciated wood. It’s elegant, malleable, light, cheap. It’s soft enough that it can also be unforgiving with mistakes. But nobody’s perfect. You can make almost anything with it. Here’s a piece I made for my wife on her birthday. Like the vast majority of people in the psychotherapeutic profession she’s been relegated to virtual sessions, a mix of phone and zoom. She’d been improvising various ways to get her iPad at just the right height that she could comfortably speak with her patients on Zoom calls while sitting on a couch.
Look at the elegance and simplicity of the lines.
The key is you simply can’t do this if you’re focused on the ventilation or how many people are around you or with any sense that you need to get done quickly and limit your exposure. It’s like lounging around in a bookstore looking for the right book, back when there were bookstores. Not having a clock is an elemental part of it.
Ten good pine boards. Now to plywood. I don’t work much with plywood. But there’s a wood storage build I’ve wanted to do which requires it. Eight more boards. Not a lot of picking out. Plywood is basically plywood.
Now to construction lumber. I have a new woodworking bench I’ve been working on in fits and starts. One key to a good woodworking bench is that it needs to be very heavy. A woodworking bench is a tool the purpose of which is to hold a work piece in place and immovable while you plane it, saw it, chisel it, whatever you’re doing. You need the bench to be heavy enough that it doesn’t move at all even as you apply various levels of repetitive force to a workpiece held in place on it. The one I am building has a bench top made up of eighteen 2″ x 6″ by 8′ foot boards, glued together long ways one after another. Once you’ve milled them to size and cleaned them up you end up with with a bench top 24 inches wide, 8 feet long and 5 inches thick. Crazy heavy.
I ordered lumber for it a couple months ago. But I was only able to get 12 usable boards out of the 20 or so I ordered. Six more clean and relatively straight fir boards and I’m good to go.
Big box store construction lumber isn’t intended for people making workbenches. It’s intended for construction projects in which excessive knots, warp, gashed edges and more don’t really matter, at least not within some limits. For bench making they don’t need to be perfect. I mill and plane them into clean and true components. But they need to be basically straight and intact. So more stacking and eyeballing. With 2x lumber you can feel by obvious differences in weight which boards are holding lots of excess water. You need them all in the same ballpark of moisture and resin content. So back to eyeballing six good boards, which turns out to be more time-consuming than the pine even though the quality I need is more forgiving with the construction lumber. Done and done.
I found it hard to totally shake my resistance to being around strangers, feeling on guard when I’m in any indoor space other than my home. But mostly I was able to do it. I was still masked and told myself, I think accurately, that even if the person next to me had contagious covid the odds of my getting it were very low and the odds of my getting seriously sick were down to the odds closer to lightening strikes or just the ambient risk of all manner of things we are mostly untroubled by in our daily lives. So I was fine. I didn’t need to rush. I didn’t need to worry about holding down my odds. To be clear, this wasn’t being clustered with lots of people in a tight poorly ventilated space. As anyone who’s been in a suburban Home Depot knows the aisles are broad, the crowds are fairly light, there’s ample ventilation. It’s not a high risk space even in the worst of moments. But in this pandemic year risk feels pervasive, constant.
As I think most of us have I was acutely aware of the layers of hyper-caution, uncertainty, sometimes ambient terror I have learned to clothe myself in over more than a year, and never so acutely aware of it as when I began to peal back these layers which have become almost second nature. Even when I’d gotten into the car to go on this trip it felt different, liberated, free, even though I’ve of course driven regularly through the pandemic. I wasn’t on guard. I wasn’t passively, somewhere in the back of my mind thinking through ways to limit my risk toward some level I could be at ease with.
There’s one more chapter to the story. I bought a lot of wood. When I got to my car I realized I’d dramatically mis-calculated the width of the car and the biggest pieces of plywood. Fuck! I need to get these delivered. And as long as I’m getting the two biggest pieces delivered I might as well get it all delivered. So I drag it all back to the store. Getting material delivered after you’ve already purchased it and taken it out to your car turns out to be a lengthy process. Okay … but I’ve got time. Even just waiting for thirty or forty minutes. I can wait. It’s different. I’m in a different place.
If you have stories about pealing back the layers of self-protection and hyper-caution that have become second nature to so many of us over the last year I would love to hear them.
Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) is editor and publisher of TPM.
In actuality, we’re fumbling a little further out of our comfort zone. My wife broke down over getting all of our groceries delivered a week or so ago. Just couldn’t take it anymore, and now she’s making grocery store trips (although only to stores with strong mask enforcement and no crowding, like Whole Foods, TJs and Sprouts).
We’re also receiving guests. Of our local pod my Father is past his two weeks, mother and mother-in-law are about a week away. Father-in-law is past two weeks, his wife has had her second. Brother and sister-in law both past two weeks. We’ve also had other partially vaccinated people outdoors. Wife and father-in-law went on brief trip, eating out (only once indoors).
I’m in no rush, but I guess I’m weird or broken or something. I’d have been happy to sit this out through July (what I’d originally expected before Biden’s vaccine surge).
I think after April 30th you might get me to go to an outdoor restaurant. Might shop in a hardware store for something non-critical. Peruse scotch thoughtfully. Really not feeling the pressure though, just having it laid on me by other people.
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