Sounds like an interesting read. I’ll check to see if I can get a copy through my local library - WHEN IT EVER REOPENS.
Speaking of the OP - libraries. Figure some way to reopen, al least for drive-thru pickup. quarantine/fumigate materials as appropriate.
Read a few things yesterday and today that I thought reasonable. (May just be bias confirmation).
The vast majority of transmissions are believed to have occurred indoors. Which supports my feeling that most outdoor activity bears little risk, w/ use of distancing/masks as practicable.
Rather than closing parks, Seattle adopted a policy urging people to “Keep moving.” Banned large groups, and even resting on benches. Some parking lots were closed, and civilian “ambassadors” encouraged compliance. Some circular paths were designated 1-way, and other streets were closed to vehicles to allow ped/bike recreation. Impressed me as a reasonably tailored response, rather than an over-reactive shutdown.
An article about early “social distancing” research decades ago, one of the doctors said closing public schools was the single biggest factor. In their models, for a town of 10k, if schools were closed, 500 people got sick, as opposed to 50% if the schools stayed open. I have not seen that sort of modeling data to describe the relative benefit from various actions. By all means - take the biggest actions. But when the possible benefit lessens, other factors should be considered.
Just a couple of things I found interesting, and which were relevant to my SOMEWHAT skeptical attitude towards SOME of the restrictions.
Some of the things you mention seem reasonable, but IMHO opening libraries is not one of them. While it seems to be well established that the coronavirus has a limited infectious life outside a host, ISTM that any enterprise whose central business involves borrowing and returning objects and passing them around potentially large numbers of people and places is not a good idea. Nor are many (or any?) libraries equipped for any sort of drive-through. And books contain effectively an extremely large total surface area.
Maybe I’m biased by the fact that I’m a big Kindle fan and haven’t been to a library in a great many years, nor even to a bookstore in quite a while. Reading books is a great way to spend time while cooped up at home, but ebooks seem like the ideal way to do it. I must have at least half a dozen yet-unread ebooks among the hundreds on my Kindle. I’m sure that identical electronic delivery services are available for other ereaders, and epub readers may have an even wider selection than Amazon’s proprietary formats.
Regarding Nate Silver’s Signal and the Noise, unfortunately for some strange reason it appears to be out of print in the US or at least not available for Kindle on amazon.com, but a Kindle version is available from Amazon Canada. I know that I’ve bought physical books from amazon.com and had them shipped to Canada, and I’m fairly sure I’ve occasionally done it with ebooks. But having a popular book like that available in one country but not the other is a damn strange situation and Amazon may not allow a cross-border purchase in this case for some legal reason of copyright terms or something of that nature.
I can see why they would want small, single-owner, sub-10 employee businesses to open.
But tattoo parlors seem dumb. Sure, the tattooist is wearing protective equipment but that’s because they’re poking holes in the person’s skin for extended periods. Usually, skin is non-porous to something like a Coronavirus. While being tattooed, that ceases to be true and greatly expands the entry point for an infection. If anyone else in the shop sneezes, or if there’s a little bit of dust floating about, you’re at risk.
I also wouldn’t be surprised if tattooing is sufficiently stressful that it depresses your immune system, temporarily.
Tell tattoo agencies to do non-permanent tattoos. The world will be a better place, for most people, in more than one way.
This is exactly what I mean about risk vs uncertainty. We still don’t know how this disease is transmitted. We know a lot more than we did a month ago, I think, and the picture is starting to come into focus, but it’s still uncertain. If you are uncertain if transmission is primarily through surfaces or droplets or aresols, if you are uncertain which people are contagious and for how long, you can’t run those models. For example, the school thing. I don’t know what disease that’s based on, but we know COVID is weird for kids–they get infected, but they don’t get sick. What we still honestly don’t know, apparently, is to what degree infected children are contagious. That seems like a simple question to answer, but apparently there’s not enough evidence to say. Chances are, whatever disease was modeled before was really different in it’s patterns. Added to that–if you are uncertain who or how many people have it, you can’t tell what is a reasonable precaution. It’s not just that we don’t know which individuals have it, we don’t know if it’ 5% or 10% or 30% of the population–and what might be safe at 5% would be insanity at 10%.
Again, it’s coming more into focus as we test more, learn more, but there’s a lot of uncertainty here, and it’s about things that are hard for a layperson to understand. We can’t rely on models of other diseases.
Give me the option to invest as little or as much money in a very high risk stock, I might invest some, if I knew the risks and had reason to believe the returns might be great. But ask if I want to invest in a stock where the risks are entirely unknown? No way.
My library is already doing curbside pick up. They have the whole time. They are not recirculating books. You check them out electronically, roll up, and they hand them to you.
Lots of reasons, including all the ones I already mentioned, the ones running coach mentioned (many libraries may not have their catalogs online at all, let alone having facilities for online reservations). But I think the main reasons are (a) that libraries don’t have the kind of operating margins to support that kind of high-overhead service, (b) the possible contamination of books, and perhaps the most important, (c) the ready availability of ebooks, including the capability of “borrowing” ebooks from the libraries themselves. It’s not a service that I’ve ever used myself, but the New York Public Library system, for one, says the service is still being offered and is the best alternative to deal with the library closures.
Again, maybe I’m biased by how much I use my Kindle, but I have tons of quality new reading material and couldn’t care less about libraries. For instance, the latest by my favorite non-fiction author, Erik Larson, about Churchill’s life during the war, and the aforementioned Nate Silver book, which took about 20 seconds to get, and an old (but new to me) collection of James Thurber stories, whose humor I find somewhat Wodehousian (as in PG).
I realize that not everyone owns an e-reader and that libraries are a part of many people’s frequent routine, but the reasons for keeping them closed seem to me to be fairly objective.
I find that somewhat surprising. Not recirculating them solves part of the problem, but it still seems redundant in the age of digital media. The New York Public Library system, probably the largest in the country, is entirely closed except for ebooks.
Right. The card catalog has been online for years and years. You request your book(s), input your account number, and they hold them for pickup. Instead of going to the desk, they could just bring them outside.
I take it you don’t have a small child at home. Kids like real books. Past that, lots of people either don’t have an e-reader, aren’t savvy enough to use them/check books out on them, or prefer physical books. Even more than that, there’s not enough copies in the e-reader collection to go around: they have a limited number of licenses per title. Before this, I often found the wait for electronic books to be really long, and lots and lots of things I looked for, especially things more than 10 years old, just weren’t there. I can’t imagine it’s gotten better.
Texas also has a lower infection rate than NYC–and more people with cars. So the level of risk may be really different.
Yeah - I guess I was talking about my local library, rather than all libraries. One reason we moved to this town was the excellent library. It has a great on-line catalog, and driveup service. Moreover, they are still paying their staff (my dtr is among them). I thought there was some pretty good idea of how long the virus remained on surfaces. something like 3 days? Couldn’t books be recirculated after that time?
Also, I personally detest e-readers. Fortunately, I decided to use this time to work through all of Shakespeare’s plays - which I had at home. So I’m good for a while.
Manda Jo, I’m going to have to do some more reading on uncertainty vs risk, b/c I’m not really getting it. Not sure it isn’t largely semantic.
Depending on your preference/point of view, you could either view the uncertainties as great or limited. For example, it is a respiratory virus - so we have good reason to believe it will act similarly to other respiratory viruses. Even tho we don’t know many specifics, we can safely assume it isn’t like ebola or AIDS (but even ebola/AIDS are relevant in terms of social networks, mobilizing response, quarantine, etc.)
I was trying to explain this to my BIL yesterday. He is majorly upset that all the playgrounds have been cordoned off so that my nieces no longer have a place to run wild. He’s generally a laidback fellow, but his anger was palpable.
There’s so much about this thing that we don’t know. A couple of weeks ago we thought this was just a respiratory illness. Now it is being conceptualized as a disease attacking the circulatory system, with the lungs just being one of many casualties. A couple of weeks ago we thought people who were asymptomatic were truly asymptomatic. Now we are realizing that such individuals only appear to be asymptomatic; one moment they can look fine and the very next they can be dead.
Given all the uncertainties, it would be irresponsible to err on the side of “normalcy”. Like, imagine you’re a town mayor. The local health department is able to do contact tracing and they find that an outbreak originated in one of the city parks, specifically at the playground. Now you’ve got to explain to the public why that park was allowed to be open when all the other jurisdictions shut theirs down weeks ago out of an abundance of caution. Mayors are going to be second-guessed no matter what they do. But I think most would rather they be criticized for being “overly draconian” than for being a callous murderer.
I disagree. People use libraries for more than just books. Children without access to books and computers use them for studying, adults use them for job searches, people use their copy machines, etc. Heck, homeless people use them for shelters during the hours they are open.
How are libraries less essential than hardware stores?
It’s like, if I know that a mortgage has a 5% or 15% or 33% chance of defaulting, I can adjust the interest rate that I charge, and still make it a safe investment. But if I literally have no clue about what the risk is, if I am uncertain, I can’t account for that. So the only sensible thing to do is to treat it as 100% likely to default and not touch it with a 10-ft pole.
Comparisons to other respiratory viruses only go so far. The kids thing is huge–if kids aren’t really very contagious, it’s a whole different ballgame than if they are highly likely to be asymptomatic carriers. And we just don’t know which of those are true. We know we can find traces of virus on surfaces days later, but we don’t know if you can catch it that way. I think the jury is still out on whether the aresolized particles can actually infect a person. It’s really a very different disease.
What we need is information. The fact that this has become politically polarized makes getting that information much, much more difficult.
Not to digress on this tangent, but it’s kind of an important part of the stay-at-home situation we all find ourselves in. May I ask if your experience was based on older generations of e-readers? When I decided to give Kindle a shot, I ordered the cheapest basic model that was then available from Amazon, which had no illumination, limited fonts, and a default font that I hated, with none of the alternatives much better. It was also gray-on-gray type, and more difficult to read in bed than a real book, requiring brighter light.
This was a time when Kindles were also being sold through some retail outlets, and I had a chance to have some hands-on experience with the Paperwhite. I was astounded at the difference in readability, not to mention several new fonts that were very, very print-like (Baskerville is now my standard default). So I sent back the original Kindle and got a Paperwhite and have been delighted with it. Compared to a physical book, it’s small and light and can be read in dim light or total darkness, and the front-lighting on the e-ink is completely different and far more natural than the rather glaring backlighting of an LCD screen.
I mentioned my beloved bookshelves in another thread, and there truly is something wonderful about pulling a good book from a bookshelf and settling down in an armchair with a table lamp or floor lamp behind you and getting lost in some good literature. But nothing beats a front-lit e-reader like a Paperwhite for reading in bed, and that’s where I do a lot of my reading.
Yeah - not interested in pursuing this tangent. Suffice it to say, in addition to my general preference against digital, reading paper books/magazines/newspapers are among the few things I really enjoy. If, at some point, I am forced to switch to digital, I will. But not before.
The need to use diverse digital methods to achieve a poor substitute for the analog activity has been an ongoing source of displeasure for me. Not full luddite, but definitely luddite tendencies.
Reading paper in bed is one of my great pleasures and I have no need or desire to change how i do it. The ONLY realistic application I’ve thought of was travel - but I rarely travel long enough that I need more than 2 books.
A tattoo parlor is as “dangerous” as a dentists’ office. Tattoo artists use autoclaves to sterilize everything that isn’t disposable. They have been dealing with diseases like HIV and hepatitis under regulatory regimes for decades.
I wouldn’t be surprised if your supposition about the “stress” of tattooing causing depression of immune response is wrong. Stressors like fasting increase immune response. And tattoos aren’t particularly stressful. Do you think tripping and skinning a knee is likely to globally depress a person’s immune system?
I’m not advocating for tattoo parlors to be opened. I simply want to counter your pseudological arguments: arguments made in bad faith. It’s clear from your final paragraph that your specious rationalizations are motivated by snobbery. You are motivated by your emotional attachment to some antiquated sense of aesthetics, not reason.
Like the teachers unions and other officials cited in the article I’m not convinced by one study (which has not yet been peer-reviewed). It’s pretty well established that children are not immune to COVID-19 but are asymptomatic carriers. Current evidence indicates that asymptomatic carriers are driving the spread of the virus and that children are not immune but are asymptomatic carriers.
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I’d really prefer to believe your study, but I can’t do so yet.
