Tag Archives: Hot Topics

The Kaiser Family Foundation has put up  comparisons of one new way (if passed) to obtain healthcare coverage and two existing ways of obtaining healthcare coverage (subsidized coverage) for those who lost job-based health insurance since in the Covid-19 pandemic. I had talked about two of the ways previously. Options The two existing options (besides over priced Cobra) are: Medicaid, for which 47% of those lacking insurance are eligible (Kaiser’s...

Yea, Trump Issuing another Executive Order is a big so-what. What else is new? This one is a little different and concerns social media websites. “In a country that has long cherished the freedom of expression, we cannot allow a limited number of online platforms to hand pick the speech that Americans may access and convey on the internet.  This practice is fundamentally un-American and anti-democratic.  When large, powerful social media companies censor...

Yea, Trump Issuing another Executive Order is a big so-what. What else is new? This one is a little different and concerns social media websites. “In a country that has long cherished the freedom of expression, we cannot allow a limited number of online platforms to hand pick the speech that Americans may access and convey on the internet.  This practice is fundamentally un-American and anti-democratic.  When large, powerful social media companies censor...

This is the same stuff/sh*t, I am seeing in Michigan. I wish I could give them one week of Covid so they could learn. The following is from Digby at Hullabaloo: I just watched another 60 something mask-less Republican woman in Arizona standing in a crowd of others just like herself tell the news media that she thinks the Coronavirus is not worse than a cold or the flu and she has no fear of it. (She also weirdly said that they don’t even have a name for...

As noted in my last post, I have been looking at data. This usually causes trouble, and today is no exception. As anyone who was paying attention predicted, the “Easter Effect”–a large gathering of people (“EC” or Otherwise) in an enclosed area that likely has multiple asymptomatic carriers (and likely a few with symptoms) is a recipe for infection. With a two- to three-week gestation period, that there was going to be an increase in cases at the end of...

I was a vehement advocate of prescribing hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) off label while waiting for the results of clinical trials. I wasn’t all that much embarrassed to agree with Donald Trump for once. Now I feel obliged to note that my guess was totally wrong. I thought that the (uncertain) expected benefits were greater than the (relatively well known) costs. The cost is that HCQ affects the heart beat prolonging the QT period (from when the atrium...

I am reading this on Bloomberg entitled “Saudi oil rush threatens to disrupt stabilizing U.S. oil market.” These shipments are planned, Saudis are not sending this over out of the goodness of their hearts. Furthermore, the shipments themselves take roughly 21 days to get to the US. The orders were placed over 3 weeks ago. When you have a lot of US capacity which produces at a higher price and we are seeking to become oil independent and we are seeking to...

I am interested in critiquing my understanding of the simplest SIR epidemiological model and also praising a critique of an effort to extend the model and guide policy developed by some very smart economic theorists. First the useful point is that this post by Noah Smith is brilliant. As is typical, Smith argues that the useful implications economic models depend on strong assumptions so economic theory isn’t very useful. He praises simple empirical...

Tired: Remdesivir Wired: Merimopodib Inspired: Both Merimopodib (of which I just read for the first time) is an inhibitor of an enzyme used to make Guanosine. Viruses need a lot of Guanosine (and other nucleosides) to reproduce, so it is an antiviral. It can be taken orally and there is a known safe dose. A preprint asserts that a combination of Remdesivir and Merimopodib completely blocks SARS-CoV-2 replication in vitro. Here is the abstract The IMPDH...

The Greater Good “If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers.” — Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow Originally written in 2018 on the Save The Post Office blog and featured at Angry Bear in 2019, retired North Carolina Post Master Mark Jamison wrote on the issues facing USPS while in competition with Amazon, UPS, and FedX. The same issue has been brought to the forefront again with President Trump refusing to...