You don’t want to control epidemics, you want to eradicate them. In the United States, it will be difficult even to control COVID. We have been left with a poisoned well, where a large part of the public does not believe that the centuries-old weapons to destroy epidemics: track and trace, isolate and vaccinate, matter […]
COVID Kills Through Love
If you were an alien preparing to overcome Earth’s humans, how might you proceed? (Forget the titanic ships and WWII style air battles; most extraterrestrials are not as foolish as Hollywood popcorn sellers.) Might you start with an invisible, microscopic pathogen? Infect without any symptoms? Spread through the air? Confuse the human immune system with […]
Covid-19: Thought Experiments
A penny for your thoughts? Einstein thought them worth far more. He used “thought experiments” to explain the nature of relativity and the universe. Einstein would ask, what if? What if you use established principles and relate them to scenarios that can’t be experimented upon, or do not yet exist? Let’s apply some thought experiments […]
Covid-19 and AIDS: Parallels
The past is never past. As I wrote two months ago, the bungled political response to Covid-19 eerily paralleled the first American responses to AIDS https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-power-rest/202005/aids-and-covid-19-weve-been-here. The present parallels between Covid-19 and AIDS continue to increase: Both diseases are nasty and lethal in unexpected ways With AIDS, originally GRIDS (Gay-Related Immune Deficiency Syndrome), many of the […]
Covid-19 – Using the Skew for You
Could you be a superspreader of Covid-19? Chances are good you will not know. Many spreaders are asymptomatic. But more and more research demonstrates a minority of those afflicted – 10-20% of the total – infect 80% of total cases. The result is a low kappa – the degree of “skew” in the epidemic’s data. […]