Shields up 🛡
🪫 But do we have the will to keep ourselves and each other safe any more?
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I got an email last night from our oldest daughter’s school, saying that they were returning to requiring masking for the next two weeks. The view of the governing board was that the risk of Covid infection was increasing. A welcome message of sanity. All around New Zealand, schools are having to take measures to deal with increased teacher sickness and absence levels, including rostering classes, or asking parents to keep children at home. We are only just getting into winter. I feel there is worse to come. All around the world, winter or not, Covid cases are being under-counted, as infection levels rise again.
In Australia, NSW Health has recommended the reintroduction of mandatory indoor masks, density limits, a ban on singing and dancing, and a return to working from home ahead of daily COVID-19 cases reaching a projected 25,000. The recommendations were contained in a presentation to Health Minister Brad Hazzard. The recommendations represent a return to the restrictions in place before being relaxed in February.
But Mr Hazzard was reportedly “not at all keen” to reintroduce the rules, which would be a “last resort” despite concerns about a new sub-variant of Omicron and the sizeable portion of people yet to have a booster vaccine. Mr Hazzard said:
As Health Minister I am not at all keen to be heading back the path that has exhausted everybody with all the restrictions. All that would be a last resort from my perspective.
So, how do you know you’ve hit “last resort”, if you’ve taken steps to reduce the amount of intelligence you’re getting telling you how bad things are getting? Seems like wilfully poking your eyes out to me (though as I type this, the NZ Government is holding a press conference on what surveillance measures are being used to monitor new variants of Covid-19). I’d be keen to hear your thoughts on this.
Another strange week. I feel like I say this almost every week. It’s a sign of the times we are living in. For example, a platinum Jubilee celebration for Queen Elizabeth II, our Head of State, rapidly followed by an attempt to topple the Prime Minister of the UK by factions of his own political party. A crazy juxtaposition of stability and turbulence if I ever saw one. The vote of no confidence motion failed, but the result was indecisive enough that more people are predicting Mr Johnson doesn’t have long left in this particular political incarnation. But, this has been said before. Elsewhere, the public hearings by the House committee investigation into the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol starts on Thursday and will be broadcast live on most TV stations there.
Our middle daughter has been hit hard by a mystery D&V virus over the last 72 hours. Sleep has been scarce, and I think my wife and I have washed our hands more in the last 3 days than through the entire pandemic. So far, no-one else has come down with it (and repeated negative covid antigen tests too). Keep your fingers crossed for us all.
Let’s get to this week’s stories.
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“It’s not happening, it’s not happening…”
Here’s the paradox we are living right now: If we decide too early that the pandemic is over (e.g. through explicit policy decisions, or implicit reversion to older behaviours), then we could end up dragging it out for even longer. Others say we could be under-counting by a factor of 30.
A growing majority of the U.S. population now has some immunity to sars-CoV-2, the virus that causes covid-19, whether from vaccination, past infection, or both. However, staggeringly infectious members of the Omicron family have demonstrated an ability to evade some of those protections. Since April, they have led to a quadrupling of daily coronavirus cases; the U.S. has been reporting more than a hundred thousand a day, but, because widely used at-home tests don’t show up in official tallies, the true number could be five or even ten times higher.
Another “You couldn’t make this up” moment
Axon, the company formerly known as Taser, has abandoned plans to build a stun gun-equipped drone intended for deployment in schools after an “exodus” of resignations from its internal ethics board.
Axon had announced its plans late last week, framing them as a response to the shootings in Buffalo, New York and Ulvade, Texas. The remotely operated drone, visualised in a mock-up as a bright yellow device bristling with cameras and weaponry, was intended to be “capable of incapacitating an active shooter in less than 60 seconds”.
Axon's founder and CEO Rick Smith said the company's announcement last week … was intended to "initiate a conversation on this as a potential solution." Smith said the ensuing discussion "provided us with a deeper appreciation of the complex and important considerations" around the issue.
Jan 6 Hearings prepare to take centre stage
Maggie Haberman is an astonishingly good journalist. I try to read everything she writes.
She is a White House correspondent who was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for reporting on Donald Trump’s advisers and their connections to Russia. In this article for the New York Times, Maggie writes about new details describing how the pressure campaign by Donald J. Trump and his allies to block certification of the 2020 election left the vice president’s staff fearing for his safety. Free for you to read via Noise Reduction.
Mr. Trump, who repeatedly told aides he wanted to march to the Capitol as the certification was beginning, told the crowd that he would do so. But the Secret Service told him they could not protect him, and he returned to the White House. At about 1 p.m., Mr. Pence released a memo making clear that he disagreed with the president about his power to intervene in the certification. The memo was not shared with the White House counsel in advance; the trust between the offices was shattered by then.
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Lower your shields
Watch this. It’s incredibly poignant, powerful, and prescient too.
My hope is that the vulnerability and honesty displayed here reaches across time and borders. When you look at these people and listen to their worries, do you see your own fears reflected? - Bartlomiej Zmuda, filmmaker, Poland
Decisive people don’t make better decisions
Do you need to run through every single scenario that might happen before you can make a decision. And even then, you’re still not sure?
If this sounds like you, you’re certainly not unusual: many people struggle with making decisions. And other people being pretty decisive can make us not only feel like we are doing something wrong, but the speed of their decision and their confidence in doing so might mean they are right.
Certainty in decision making doesn't necessarily lead to better decisions, but uncertainty can still get in your way:
Indecisiveness can hinder our ability to pursue our goals. For example, exercise becomes difficult if each morning we second-guess ourselves and deliberate staying in bed.
Local changes, global consequences
Climate change is slowing down the conveyor belt of ocean currents that brings warm water from the tropics up to the north Atlantic.
We found the collapse of this system – called the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation – would shift the Earth’s climate to a more La Niña-like state. This would mean more flooding rains over eastern Australia and worse droughts and bushfire seasons over south-west US.
Check out this new research warning of the profound consequences to global climate if this Atlantic conveyor collapses entirely. The original research paper is available here.
Today’s superpower is subtraction
The human drive to invent new things has led to pathbreaking achievements in medicine, science and society. But our desire for innovation can keep us from seeing one of the most powerful paths to progress: subtraction.
Engineer Leidy Klotz says sometimes the best way forward involves removing, streamlining and simplifying things. Check out this podcast episode from Hidden Brain.
Talking rats are coming to save you
This is an actual thing. A scientist working with the Hero Rats Project is training rodents to navigate earthquake rubble, with promising results so far.
For someone trapped in the rubble after an earthquake, a rat might be an unwelcome sight. But one scientist has been training rats to act as first responders, equipping them with backpacks and tiny microphones so that they can lead humans to earthquake survivors. But can you imagine if a rat started talking to you?
"We are getting custom-made backpacks which will have video recorders, microphones and a location transmitter.
There’s a 6 minute video to watch on this story here too.
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We need to start calling actions to reduce the spread and impact of SARS-CoV-2 "protections" rather than "restrictions". The narrative that these are personal "limitations" rather than personal and community "protections" is misguided. That the NSW "Health" minister, Mr. "Deadly" Hazzard, thinks wearing a mask is too onerous just indicates he should not be in that position of responsibility.
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