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Jensen's avatar

On the note of socially distanced and relatively safe vacations, my family and I have been exploring state and national parks near my home in Maryland. We've been hiking the C&O Canal Trails, and recently we took a weekday trip to a beach in a state park along the Chesapeake Bay. The Chesapeake beaches tend to be less crowded in general than our seaside beaches, and since it's in a park there's no restaurants, mini-golf, etc etc, just parkland. We also went on a Monday right before a hurricane was scheduled to come up the coast (and were even able to watch the storm's approach across the bay -- don't worry, we left well before it reached us)

I think for me personally, the hardest part has been that I'm sheltering in place with my parents, and much as I love my parents, I'd desperately like to see someone who isn't them. I'm trying to see if I can't organize a responsible and properly distanced kayak trip on the Potomac with friends, where five of us each rent an individual sea kayak. I'm hoping that masks, open air, and enforced distancing by way of "we're in freakin boats" could create a safe way to get out and about with people.

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Robert Berger's avatar

I would like to thank you for your blog. Not only is it useful, it is also comforting to find that sources of unbiased fact-based, apoliticial, non-divisive information are still available, and that people like yourself are willing to make the effort to produce it.

Having said that, I would like to make an observation. This is not in any way a criticism or a suggestion, as I do not have a useful suggestion to offer. I have lived through a number of traumatic events, including 9/11, Superstorm Sandy, and surviving COVID-19 after nine days in the hospital. I have come to recognize PTSD in myself. I now notice that as I leave shul each morning, I feel relief and calm, having completed a "normal" daily ritual during these "abnormal" times. At that moment, I have subconsciously put aside thoughts of all the stressors that now surround us. Then, I light up my phone, and see your daily post in my Inbox. That causes an immediate, though minor, panic attack, as your helpful blog unfortunately reminds me that things are not normal. Then, I get a grip, force myself to open the email, and read your post. It always starts off with your "Greetings from an undisclosed location in my ..." That tiny bit of humor is really helpful, and, for some reason, I am still not tired of it. I then go on, and read your informative and helpful missives.

I am not asking you to respond to or act on this. I just wanted you to know.

Another aspect of my PTSD is that I tend to spend an unacceptable amount of time responding or commenting to posts and articles. For example:

Regarding "Ed Yong's autopsy of the American COVID-19 failure"

Although Yong makes a number of very valid observations, he unfortunately loses some credibility points by using about half the article as a platform to passionately (using a number of very non-objective adjectives) attack the Trump administration's handling of the pandemic, while ignoring previous administrations' culpability for critical issues such as defunding of critical medical equipment stockpiles (though, he does mention stockpiles as a general issue), or state and local governments' failures. Yong points to the excessive length of time it takes to produce a vaccine, but fails to mention the likely successes of the Trump administration's "Operation Warp Speed". I am not a fan of Trump, but it would be nice (and much more helpful to society in general) if people with valid information and advice would stick to the science, and avoid the politics. That is one of the really nice things about your blog. (I hope this comment is not seen as political or divisive).

Yong also loses some credibility by jumping on the currently fashionable "systemic racism" bandwagon. There is no question that Black communities suffered from the pandemic disproportionately. The author makes an excellent argument that long past systemic racism contributed to the current suffering. However, he fails to make a factual or scientific case that systemic racism exists today and is a substantive contributing cause to the pandemics disproportionate effect on Black communities.

Finally, I take issue with the author's claim that "Diagnostic tests are easy to make". I admit they are easy to make (putting aside supply chain issues), however, as we have seen, they are not easy to make accurate or indicative of useful information, nor are they easy to process in a timely manner once administered on a large scale (see an earlier post of yours).

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