That’s where you add a stochastic dimension to the problem for unpredictability… 
At the risk of going OT and ending up wearing concrete boots on my next visit to Chicago… I assert a pet peeve point and make a bold statement:
The Chicago school models require these “rational” actors for their math to work. Their models don’t flow from facts to math, they took some math from physics then demanded the facts fit.
My argument was not a defense of the Chicago school, though, which I agree with you about, but about the whole practice of attempting to fit complex and disjointed human behavior into an economic model. I’d argue that that is the whole problem in a nutshell. Even Marx was trying to shove human behavior into his model of class warfare. As I said, YMMV, of course, but as a historian, I find human behavior to be much more unpredictable than people looking at the world via an economic lens often allow for.
[ETA] I would argue that this is part of the larger phenomenon described by Karl Polyani in his postwar book The Great Transformation which originally came out in the immediate postwar period… he sort of argued that the marketization of society in the late 19th and early 20th century contributed to the economic and social disasters of first few decades of the 20th century (wars and the great depression). I think it’s an implicit argument for not trying to shoehorn everything into an economic model…
It’s worth a read if you’ve never had the chance to read it.
An “excessive number” of synapses were eliminated during the course of the disease, “more than you would expect to see in a normal brain,” the authors wrote.
Eep!
But maybe there’s some comfort to be found in (from what I recall) the newish understanding that our brain can regenerate more than previously believed.
“what does not kill me makes me stronger” offers me a tragic yet inspiring deficit to overcome 
if it’s eliminating more synapses than a brain even has, that’s like negative cognition or something…
actually, that explains so much 
Who said what where now?
I missed that potential reading of that post. 
sorry, it was an intentional misreading of the quote on my part.
they might have more safely said: comparing a covid brain to a normal brain, an excessive number of synapses were eliminated.
dumb joke is dumb. ( i’m not sure if i should hope my jokes were much more clever before i had covid 
)
Nah, I was the dumb one, for not getting a good joke.
Thanks for the explanation. 
Of course, as we’ve seen so often during this pandemic, the in vitro results often don’t match with what goes on in vivo, so despairing over this may well be as premature as getting excited about new potential cures.
And as if the universe heard my cries…
At least with the regular doses of terrifying research I have the teenager, who last night came down with something that we hope is flu, obediently staying in bed.
The flu shots seem a little more hit and miss this year.
NIH has established a self-reporting covid test result portal.
That’s good but it also seems a couple years late. Early on in the pandemic it was remarkably difficult to self-report the results of home tests and they were generally not included in official numbers even if you did.
These are via the OK Doomer Substack list, as a counterpoint to the “Omicron is milder” and other themes in the media.
This is older research (May 2022), pre-print, but with solid by-lines.
Our analysis suggests that the intrinsic severity of the Omicron variant may be as severe as previous variants.
Meanwhile, from McGill University’s Office for Science and Society
Take-home message:
- Some people believe that public health measures against COVID-19, including masking and staying home, have resulted in an understimulation of children’s immune systems called an “immunity debt,” and that children are getting more sick now because of it
- The phrase “immunity debt” comes from a French position paper published in 2021 and no evidence was cited to back up this claim
- It’s not that children’s immune systems are weaker, but rather that they are all being exposed to viruses from which they were shielded when public health measures were in place, and they are now falling ill at the same time
This is the most important part. It is a specific cohort driving this phenomenon we are seeing. The under-4’s mostly were protected from the usual snotoses for 2 1/2 years or so, and upon exposure, they all got sick pretty much simultaneously, bringing them home to sibs and parents who had had pre-covid exposures, but no booster in 2 1/2 years, some of whom got sick as well, repeat ad nauseum. Thing is, this was expected, predicted, and acting as though it is a huge surprise in totally disingenuous. We knew this was going to happen if the precautions all went away at once, like they did. Our only error was underestimating how quickly those precautions would collapse. But here we are…
Are they trying to justify policy?
Sure as heck seems like it. But this story cuts both ways. If the virus was so mind-blowingly transmissible that one infected person on an outdoor jog could infect dozens of people in the general vicinity with such a fleeting exposure then there’s clearly no hope of ever containing it with even the most draconian of lockdowns.
I think I’ll cross post this in that masking topic.
I can not believe this is where we are as a country, this person was re elected.
