The You&Me Blog

Remember Me?

Posted Tuesday June 9, 2020

Remember Me? Coronavirus Updates and questions Once we have information how are we going to use it? For all the “we’re in this together” talk, no, we aren’t. Certain groups are much more at risk from respiratory viruses in general than others, and in the case of COVID-19 (which we will continue to call it for clarity purposes) younger people are typically only mildly impacted, but older people, especially people in their 70s and 80s are much more seriously affected. Let’s look at some findings. Here’s data collated in a Forbes post from May 26th. This is still (as of Jun 9th) the latest data...

Media Inoculation

Posted Wednesday May 27, 2020

There are times when our media can be toxic, so here are some concepts to “inoculate” yourself and increase your “immunity” to toxic and unhelpful news. FYI, some of this might be helpful for the current virus news, but it also applies to anything involving technical future predictions or discussions of science based conditions in the popular media. Good news is no news, but bad news means clicks. So here are some ways the media try to make sure that your news is as bad as possible. Beware of Percentages News organizations love to present percentages in the most dramatic way possible. One of...

The Elephant in the Room?

Posted Wednesday May 20, 2020

What about religion? Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. First Amendment, US Constitution Americans take their religion seriously. But what should happen if we have a really dangerous epidemic in the United States? Coronavirus, by the way, isn’t that epidemic. So far coronavirus infections have killed an estimated 180 to 320 people under the age of 45 in the...

What Can a List Tell Us?

Posted Monday May 18, 2020

Medscape, a medical website, has a long list of “health care providers” who have died recently in ways that are somehow related to COVID-19. Some facts about this list that might not be completely apparent, so before we drive into an analysis we need to list some cautions and caveats. This list is rather random and is basically a bunch of user driven posts, not a comprehensive and curated list. It doesn’t represent everyone who passed away from COVID-19 who was also at some point in their lives working as a health care provider. Most of the people on this list are not from the United States,...

The New York Times Stole Our Thunder

Posted Thursday May 14, 2020

We started off a planned longer series of looking at where we should go with our response to this (and other) viral threats, but this opinion piece from the New York Times pretty much sums up where we were going with it. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/14/opinion/reopen-america-coronavirus-lo... The writer is certainly one of our top qualified experts in infectious disease (remember, there is NO one “top expert” in infectious disease, despite what media writers keep parroting) so his opinion is certainly worth reading, although no person can predict the future and experts are some of the...

Why We Don't Need Politics But Science.

Posted Wednesday May 13, 2020

Why we don't need politics but science. People seem to want to make everything about politics these days. But if we are going to figure out what to do with coronavirus and all the other viruses that aren’t going anywhere soon, or which will start up in the future, because that’s what viruses do, we need to gather large amounts of accurate data, and then have it analyzed by non-political experts in the fields of virology and epidemiology, so we can minimize viral impact with the least amount of collateral damage. Imagine a scenario where you go to the hospital with a bad toe infection. And the...

The Epicenter and What It Can Tell Us About Prevalence

Posted Monday May 11, 2020

We seem to recall some science-y/medical types in New York City grumping the other day about the results of a community survey of coronavirus antibody prevalence in Los Angeles. They didn’t like the 1.5-2% prevalence that was found, for some reason. We guess they all shut up after New York did their own survey and found that the antibody prevalence in New York City was about 20%. We haven’t seen that they have done any more surveys, again for some reason. And when we say for some reason, we mostly think it’s because these results are counter to the current prevailing narrative. That’s too bad...

Essential?

Posted Sunday May 10, 2020

You all have that Facebook friend, right? The one who responded to virus news with posts like “We should shut down the country now!” and so on. Probably, you realized that there wasn’t any point in responding and let it go. But you thought something like this. Okay, let’s shut down the country. But wait, we need police and firefighters and EMS to respond to life threatening emergencies. And we need hospitals for the sick people. And then we need the roads to stay clear and repaired, and gas and tires and auto repair to be available so that those police and firefighters and EMS and hospital...

Positivity

Posted Tuesday May 5, 2020

It occurs to us that some of our latter posts about the current virus situation have been somewhat negative in tone at times. They may be heartfelt, but it also occurs to us that there is already plenty of negativity to be found on this topic. So, today we are going to focus on some positives that might have gotten buried in the noise. The United States, and many other countries, have successfully “flattened the curve” of viral transmission. Remember, that was the goal of all these stay at home orders and lock downs. It was never to have no virus, or sadly, no deaths, because that is simply...

A Thing That's Not a Thing

Posted Monday May 4, 2020

We aren’t here to criticize Dr. Anthony Fauci, an extremely accomplished government leader who is also extremely knowledgeable in the field of infectious diseases. The man has already been the target of ridiculous, uninformed attacks, much to our nation’s shame. This post is not about Dr. Fauci. This post is about the problem of our media repeating things that they don’t understand or which simply are not true. Specifically, we have noted an unfortunate tendency of media outlets to describe Dr. Fauci as “the nation’s top expert in infectious diseases.” Now to be clear, although Dr Fauci doesn...