A Concerned Scientist

Chemist, Dad, outdoorsman looking to get my off-grid life in order. Science, COVID and politics are most of what I talk about.

If you aren't outraged, you aren't paying attention.

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npub1gkx8d2f6ahf03mmpn45yn4fkh2rrda77x0708fz488kvtr5xfa2qmqufsp

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BE_at_qoto.org@mostr.pub

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nprofile1qqsytrrk4yawm5hcaase66zf65mt4p3k7l0r8l8n532nnmx936ry74qpz4mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujumt0wd68ytnsw43q4zvpvk

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npub1gkx8d2f6ahf03mmpn45yn4fkh2rrda77x0708fz488kvtr5xfa2qmqufsp

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Last Notes

2024-06-03 12:22:04

Don't worry. Ashish Jha is here to tell your NPR listening relatives(like, all of mine) that the new COVID variants aren't anything to worry about. He's also here to tell you that he might not keep getting vaccinated. You know, it's annoying and inconvenient, but, he'll "probably continue". What stellar leadership 🙄
https://www.npr.org/2024/06/03/nx-s1-4986102/new-covid-strain-flirt-ashish-jha

2024-05-17 20:15:58

My wife's reviewing a future Biology curriculum and she came to me with a sentence she needed to suggest a revision for because it was "just stupid." It said:
"Plants are easier to study because they don't move."
I tried to get her to change it to "Plants are easier to study because they don't scream" and apparently my "future's not in curriculum." :blobcatgooglyshrug:

2024-05-17 15:12:23

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@npub1jdw…awld
We keep blaming obesity and ignoring the effects of pollution. Just a couple of examples.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00125-022-05695-5
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10453031/

2024-04-07 13:53:06

A.J. Leonardi's newest piece is unbelievably depressing, from an epidemiological point of view, but, this is where we find ourselves. Deal with it as you see fit, just don't expect anyone else to actually adapt and change.
https://www.easychair.info/p/embracing-viruses

2024-03-17 14:53:34

It looks like @npub13sg…nmax has updated his document on the impacts of COVID again. It's well worth a look over even if you've looked before. Sometimes I forget about his site(https://gilchrist.great-site.net/jeff/COVID-19/) when researching something specific, so a reminder seems like a good idea.
Also make sure you get down to the links in the "Where to learn more" section for a good place to find more published science on the subject.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/16jhcwz02T4AoIzipf0Z1RQkZSak0UzIm1J_J_W98gv4/edit#heading=h.em5b53xclfo5

2024-02-26 00:51:11

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@undefined @npub1se6…cmph I'm a big fan of your knowledge that you've shared here on Mastodon and I'm wondering if you, or anyone else, could answer a question about vermiculture for us.
Both of our kids, in preparation for our move to the homestead, have chosen some "homestead skills" that they'd like to learn. My older boy really wants to do vermiculture, and I can tell there's a lot of different ways to get started, right down to just a bin.
What I'm wondering is if something like this, that we could theoretically keep either in or by our greenhouse, would be a good way for him to get started?
https://unclejimswormfarm.com/product/outdoor-compost-bin/hungry-bin-free-shipping-free-500-composting-worms/

2024-02-15 20:30:12

Notification on my phone about a Time article:
"How Long Should You Isolate With COVID-19? Experts Are Split"
Do I want to read this? No, but I did anyway. So maybe I'll save you the blood pressure spike.
Expert #1 is Osterholm. Who would have suspected? He, as he is prone to do, says that we should stop isolating because "people’s tolerance for public-health precautions has plummeted" and "many people in the U.S. haven’t paid attention to COVID-19 guidance in a long time" along with my Osterholm favorite "You have to face reality."
Let me tell you something. I only hear this "face reality" refrain from him and a certain "VP analyst" on Mastodon who blocks a lot of COVID cautious people while building a faux-COVID cautious brand here and on LinkedIn. When someone tells you this, they're basically saying, "People don't wear condoms and they love to drive drunk. Let's meet them in the middle and let them have their fun!"
Expert #2 - Lucky Tran! @npub1alm…57vz says this plan would be “a reckless anti-public-health policy that goes against science, encourages disease spread, and puts everyone at risk. The bare minimum we should have learned from this devastating pandemic that has killed and disabled millions is that we should stay home when sick.” Thank you Dr Tran!
Expert #3 - Elanor Murray. I honestly have no idea who she is, but I was glad to read that she thinks "it would be “really strange” for the CDC to relax its current guidance, given that even a five-day isolation period isn’t always long enough to stop the spread." Good job!
Expert #4 - Dr. Tara Bouton who would like you to believe that ending isolation would be reasonable at this stage of the pandemic "when fewer people who get infected die or become hospitalized."
Dr Bouton, I'm not *really* worried I'm going to die during the acute phase of COVID. This isn't the reality of a mass disabling event. Let's face reality here! Oops. Too soon?
Interestingly, Dr Bouton, while thinking it's great that *you* should go back to work, says that "she says she would stay home around that long because she’s able to—and because working as an infectious-disease doctor puts her in contact with lots of immunocompromised patients, who remain at increased risk of severe disease if they get infected."
The new west coast liberal refrain of "I can afford to, you can't, and I wear a mask for others." OK. I'm getting tired of hearing this one. I admit it.
Murray then nails it again. "She would stay home until her symptoms cleared up and wait until she’d gotten two consecutive negative test results, spaced out by at least a day, before exiting isolation."
Who is this person and how can we get her to start posting on Mastodon?
Dr Tran, again, awesome. "Tran says he’d go even further: he’d stay home for 10 days, self-test multiple times before ending isolation, and wear a mask—as he usually does anyway—upon returning to public spaces."
Finally, Osterholm weighs in that he'd also stay home for 5 days, and then wear an N95 in the "immediate aftermath" of his infection. Funny how the people all about relaxing protocols would follow them in their own lives, isn't it? Almost like you don't deserve them?
https://time.com/6695102/covid-19-isolation-guidelines-experts/

2024-02-09 16:19:52

I have some personal news to share. We're moving! As some of you already know, we have been working on a formerly abandoned homestead site, completely off-grid, with a small log cabin in the woods, for years now, trying to make it livable again. We are finally at the point where we can make this happen in the coming months. We are tentatively planning this for the summer.
For the first time in my life, really, I will no longer be an active chemist. The push and pull of going back into the office, where I am not needed, has reached a boiling point for me. I am resigning from the company I helped start and build and moving onto the next thing in my life as a forest farmer, dad and homeschool parent. Wish me luck. I've done one thing for the last 30+ years and now I'm going cold turkey away from it, to something pretty much the opposite.
I think I will be posting some about our successes and failures with the new adventure. Don't expect any pictures of us or anything. I have never found a picture of myself on the internet and there's not one of either of my boys. We're pretty private people, but, hopefully there'll be lots of nature photos along our trails and pictures of our soon-to-be plant based foods.
This year I am hoping to get some good information from the brilliant minds of Mastodon about a lot of things, including:
#Greenhouse gardening. We have an ~800 sq ft, completely empty greenhouse. It has a large built in fan on one end, but no power. We have some solar panels on a hillside near it that are decades old, but still functional, that we are planning on repurposing to power the greenhouse along with the EcoFlow solar generators that we previously used to power the cabin before getting our permanent power up and running. Depending on how power hungry the motor is, we may need to add onto that. We'll see! I honestly don't know how many hours a day we'll need use the fans, for instance.
It's a blank slate, though. Zone 7b under the latest USDA map. Concrete floor. Otherwise completely empty. We have lots of thoughts about how best to use it, both to feed the family and have some left over. In the short term we would like to can and jar excess food, but we have plans to donate to the local community in the long term.
We have a year-round running spring at an appropriate elevation above it, but it would be quite the chore to collect and get that water to the greenhouse. We also have a year-round creek below it that we could conceivably pump water up from. We also have two boys who may end up running a lot of water around manually in the short term.
#HomeAssistant - I want our #Victron equipment to talk to our HomeKit in the end. While I don't *intend* to expand our HomeAssistant usage dramatically beyond that, I know that's how these things start and next thing you know you have 100 devices. It would be pretty cool to have greenhouse monitoring equipment as well.
Do I start a setup with something simple like the HomeAssistant Yellow if I don't want to spend a ton of time on this part of the plan?
It *might* be possible to get this to communicate to our new Rheem heat pump hot water heater, too, but that's the extent of our current HomeAssistant thoughts.
#ForestFarming - We have some endangered native plants, as well as some cash crops growing both natively and intentionally planted in the forest as some test plots. Think ramps, ginseng, etc. but we are forest farming noobs.
We also have some test mushrooms going in log plugs that we intend to expand as we learn what works and what doesn't.
#LIDAR and #GIS - The state we are moving to has pretty decent LIDAR data of our property. I've played around with it quite a bit and made some fun maps. I was even able to find some hidden old logging roads that haven't been used in 100 years. I don't even know what I don't know in this area, but I'm planning to keep playing with it for data for the forest farming, running water from springs, etc.
I'm sure I'll add to this in a thread as we go and more things come up. It's all, honestly, terrifying and exhilarating at the same time at the moment, particularly for our boys who will be leaving the only home they've ever known this summer.
Also, wish me luck on my first ever public toot, I believe. I block and mute a lot of people anyway, so at least I know where those buttons are up front :)

2024-01-31 13:41:50

Has anyone else noticed the zero follower, zero following accounts that are suddenly popping up during this wave of COVID cases across the globe, seemingly just to tell COVID cautious people that they're "overreacting" or to "stop being afraid" etc.? I know mastodon.social is the "front door" to mastodon, but they're always from there and I'm seriously considering blocking the whole thing rather than a half dozen bot/trolls every day.

2024-01-30 21:05:12

I hate that I have to play this game and constantly wonder, but, is this someone else's COVID brain fog, or something else going on here? Your guess is as good as mine.
Way back two whole years ago, one morning I started getting e-mails that I at first thought were fishing attempts, but they were all coming from businesses in the same town in Texas. I started reading them a little more carefully and realized that someone was shopping around some pretty important business, but for some reason was using my address. One of them came with his phone number, so I texted the person and explained I was getting a bunch of their, seemingly important, e-mail.
At first the guy goes "No, that's my e-mail address." So I try and explain that, no, they're all in my inbox and I've used this e-mail address for 20 years. A few minutes later he replies with a "OH CRAP! There's an underscore in my e-mail. That IS your e-mail address!"
Case settled, right? No.
I continued to get his e-mail regularly. For a while I forwarded every one of them onto him like some mail service. After a while I realized he wasn't catching on. They just kept coming. Stuff he would probably really want. His car dealer account. His PayPal info. His car registration. His new mortgage paperwork that needed to be signed.
Obviously, this guy should be really glad that I'm a nice person. I have received, at one point or another, literally every piece of personal info about him. I've forwarded on the really important stuff and "forgotten" to, and deleted, a bunch of his concert and movie tickets, etc. and left him logged out of a bunch of accounts in the hope that he'd eventually wrap his head around it all and stop. I'm not his secretary, and each time I've sent something to him I've explained *directly to him* that he's using MY e-mail address again. When I e-mail or text him he doesn't seem to have any problem understanding what I'm saying.
This week I've received some really important legal stuff, I realized he's now given a lawyer my e-mail address, and I sent them to him again. But I've finally decided I'm done. I'm abandoning the e-mail address I've used for 22 years because I don't want to feel responsible for some brain addled dude's important info any longer, and I really don't want to sort through my e-mail every day trying to decide if it's for me or him.
If anyone's wondering why unemployment's low but productivity's down, crap like this is why. There's a lot of people out there who really don't seem to be functioning at a particularly high level.

2024-01-21 17:28:00

Last night my wife kind of blew my mind. We were discussing COVID and how certain people around us don't seem to notice, at all, their physical and/or mental declines over the last few years. She said, "Didn't your appendix burst shortly after you had mono?"
It took me until this morning to fully wrap my head around this and do some research. It's rare, but known in scientific literature for appendicitis to occur after mononucleosis.
Slight aside, but relevant to COVID nonetheless. I went to my doctor with terrible stomach pain before my appendix actually burst and was told "There's a viral stomach flu going around. Go home until it passes." He never even saw me. He had the lady at the front desk tell me that. I only survived it because I had a roommate at the time who found me, in a puddle of my own blood-vomit(sorry for the TMI), in our shared bathroom who rushed me to the hospital. I blacked out in a bathroom and woke up in a hospital room without an appendix.
I've also mentioned previously that I had what would now be described as brain fog after mono, and I literally didn't have the vocabulary or understanding to discuss it with anyone I knew at the time. I was a young, intelligent scientist who was suddenly struggling and I just faked it. Maybe bounced around different jobs a little more than I would have otherwise, and pretended I was fine for a long time. At least until I was, actually, well enough.
Be kind to the people who don't see it, even if it's hard sometimes. Noticing these things in yourself can be difficult. Sometimes you don't even notice for 30 years, apparently.

2024-01-09 15:13:45

I'm hoping someone can ease my mind here and tell me if I'm being a paranoid weirdo, or if this is legitimately strange.
My wife works from home with a company issued laptop. She's a teacher and she's on Zoom with students for hours a day. We've never had any issues with our network over the last three years that she's been a virtual teacher.
There's a new tech support guy at her company who's issued new rules. She had a "tech check up" with him yesterday in which he said he's going to need:
Pictures of our cable modem and routers including serial numbers and MAC addresses.
Pictures of any hardware between the cable modem and routers, including serial numbers and MAC addresses.
Pictures of any hardware between router and company issued laptop, including serial numbers and MAC addresses. This is to include any other personal computers that may be on the same segment of the network.
Is this just good, preemptive tech support and I'm overthinking it?
My first thought was that I am not sending him the info on my own, personally owned cable modem, routers and hardware firewall, so he's getting photos of the old Spectrum equipment they dropped off that's been sitting in the closet for a decade, and we'll just tell him it's a VLAN all to itself(which it is). But after sleeping on it I thought that maybe I'm overreacting.
#CyberSecurity #WorkFromHome

2023-12-01 21:24:27

Someone, very politely, DM'd me to say that they love the content of what I post, but I'm too wordy and so they have to mute me....and I'm sooooooo tempted to write them a 1000 word essay on my wordiness, it's origins, and why I'm OK with it and specifically chose a Mastodon instance that allows me over 65,000 characters per post.
My friends will get random 500 word texts about why Nikola Jokic is the greatest basketball player and Aaron Gordon is most complimentary player in the NBA for his skillset....at work in the middle of the day....there's no stopping the volume of my words!!!!
But, really, if my posts are too long, feel free not to read them 😂

2023-10-16 20:29:28

I never cease to be amazed at the fact that so few people even seem to realize that long COVID is a thing. I'm even more amazed when doctors don't. Honestly, I'm not sure why this gets to me every time at this point, but it still does.
Some of you may remember me talking about my wife's boss previously. She's had COVID at least 7 times and finally started to think that, just maybe, her "bizarre autoimmune disorder" that her doctors couldn't figure out could be COVID related.
So, today her and my wife are chatting on Zoom about things and my wife mentions that we're growing lion's mane and red reishi mushrooms in the forest. Her boss laughs and asks if she can get some because she's been spending "tons" on reishi and lion's mane supplements to "try to remember things again."
This leads down a discussion where my wife gently asks her if she's talked with her doctors about long COVID. She says "Yes! I remembered you talked about that, and I saw some headline about it, so I asked my GP. He said that's when you have COVID symptoms for more than 12 weeks. Since I'm not coughing(she is....but let's ignore that for a moment) and I can breathe well he said it's not long COVID."
Audible sigh from my wife....and she moved on. She saw me go through this with one of my friends last year when his doctor very literally laughed in his face after I convinced him to ask about whether his sudden onset of debilitating arthritis a couple of months after a COVID infection could be COVID related. It poisoned the water between us, because clearly at that point he believed his doctor and thought I was a conspiracy theorist for talking him into bringing it up.
The education on this sucks so much that you can't even help people when you really want to.

2023-09-25 14:51:11

My wife's company had a mandatory conference for all of their over 2,000 employees last week. She did not attend, thankfully. Even though it was mandatory she rolled the dice on a Telehealth appointment and the doctor she got thought it was wonderful that she hasn't gotten COVID yet, and wrote her a note suggesting that she be exempt from all in-person meetings for the next 365 days. Surprisingly, to us, HR at her company accepted it. We went camping while everyone else went to a packed, zero COVID precautions considered, conference.
No surprise at all, she's covering for many people out sick today, including the person she works most closely with who texted her to say she's "down with the worst bout of COVID yet."
She just got off of a zoom meeting with her boss, who also has COVID today, and is suddenly COVID cautious curious, let's say. She said it's her 7th(yes, seventh) known COVID infection, she has a "bizarre autoimmune disorder" that her doctors have spent a year trying to help her figure out, and she's come to believe that it *might* just be COVID related.
She asked how my wife has managed to stay COVID free, and my wife went ahead and listed out all of our precautions, and here's where watching this secretly from across the room blew my mind....The hangup was restaurants. She kept coming back to "You haven't been inside of a restaurant in 4 years?" Over and over. At least 4 times in the next 20 minutes she repeated that. Like it was some Herculean feat that couldn't be accomplished by the average human being.
I just don't get it...
Anyway, it was a bridge too far, and so she will continue getting COVID.

2023-08-31 19:59:04

I don't allow my kids unlimited time on anything other than books. They're at an age where they spend as much time as I allow on YouTube right now. I'm pretty savvy about it, we talk a lot about what's allowed and what's not and, honestly, they do a good job of sticking to content that we all agree to. They just can't have unlimited time on it.
Maybe a year ago I set up a little system in which every 2 hours of YouTube time their devices require a passcode to keep streaming. If you fail the passcode a few times, you get locked out. This has been working quite well. They don't get it until they're done with school and it gives me a chance to talk with them about whether or not they've done their chores, or whatnot, whenever they want to watch more.
Today I take a look and my 10yo has somehow logged almost 8 hours without a passcode. I go to ask him, and he tries to put his tablet face down real quick so I can't see that he's on YouTube....and he starts giggling. He tries the old "I don't know what you're talking about" but I threaten to block the internet from him entirely until he tells me how he did it...but it's obvious he kind of wants me to know anyway.
So he relents and, I kid you not, he tells me(gleefully) that he looked up details of my past addresses and phone numbers online and he's been trying them, two at a time so as not to get locked out, for a year. Once he cycled through everything he could find, he decided that I was using a one of them as a template, and adding or subtracting numbers from it, for him and his brother's passcodes. So he kept trying them, just one off of the number he'd found online, until he found one that worked.
I didn't know whether to give him an award or a punishment, so I just laughed and walked out. Kid totally hacked me. Gotta up my game to a random PIN generator or something, like I do for banking, with this kid around.

2023-08-09 13:30:13

I don't talk a lot about local politics, or how crazy things are in rural Florida these days. I want to share a local story, that's been brewing for a long time, today.
I'm pretty sure most of us have at least heard of book bans in Florida schools. What, I think, goes underreported and under discussed is just how terrifying that is for teachers. You'll find some debate about it, DeSantis says it's not true, but, as Florida schools go back into session this week a lot of the teachers my wife and I know are afraid of accidentally committing a 3rd degree felony. How? By having someone find the "wrong" book in their classroom. They've all emptied the shelves of all books, period, but there's still fear.
https://www.firstcoastnews.com/article/news/verify/florida-teacher-could-face-a-third-degree-felony-for-using-books-literature-in-class-not-approved-by-state/77-9f5a087f-8dcd-4a99-afe1-c9c23b6201cd
So, how is this playing out in my local school district? I'm not naming names because I think these poor people need a break.
Ever since a Moms 4 Liberty member got elected to our school board last year, it's been wild. Every school board meeting is jam packed with right wingers cursing and often threatening the other board members. There is one board member, in particular, who is often the focus of their scorn. She also happens to be a former principal and the woman who hired my wife for her first teaching job and a former mentor.
Last year someone was waiting by her car after a meeting with a hatchet and threatened to kill her and her family, if you want to imagine the environment here. For a while she quit going to meetings in person, and was allowed to attend virtually, for her own safety, but because of right wing pressure she's not allowed to do so this year.
This background all brings me to something I learned this morning. Back when my kids were in the local school district(we pulled our kids out and my wife left to teach elsewhere in 2021) there was this super sweet, older lady who was the librarian at their elementary school. She really liked our older boy, in particular, who is a voracious reader, and over the years she would tell his teachers just to send him to the library when he was done with his work. He would read, help shelve books, and even sit at the help desk to help other kids. She went so far above and beyond for the school. She organized plays, she bought books out of her own money...she was the glue that held that school together.
A couple years back she took a well deserved promotion to Head Media Specialist for the entire district. As such, when DeSantis began his book banning crusade she was made the head of a group of 7 people who decide, for the entire district, what books need to be pulled from libraries. Because book banning isn't happening fast enough for the Moms 4 Liberty crowd, she was outed at a school board meeting over the summer as the head of this group. No one else was named.
Since then she's endured non-stop threats. It only took me a few minutes to find her social media this morning and it's disgusting and has been, non-stop, for months.
As I was reading it I couldn't help but think of a very brief interaction I had with @npub189n…satx yesterday. This is just one example of what's happening with the Dems down here, sadly.

2023-08-07 13:23:04

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@npub1uar…vzvt @npub189n…satx @npub1r8x…lw2q
Not family, but a friend. Closest thing I had to a brother as a kid. Just a kind human being. Loved everyone. Bit of a hippie, and his dad was always a hard core conservative, but in a militia-type way. After high school we chose to go to the local college together with another couple of friends.
Long story as short as I can make it(I'm bad at short). At 17 years old he got caught smoking pot in his dorm room. His dad saw that as his last opportunity to "save" him and had him sent to military school. He came out of that seemingly OK, went back to college, but he signed up to have the military pay for his college in return for years of service after he graduated.
His wife said that's where it fell apart for him. The constant drip of Fox News changed something in him. He'd come home and talk about something that outraged the Fox News talking heads that day. You have to understand at this point he'd not only voted for, but did some work for the Obama campaign. His wife was getting alarmed, but it was manageable, I guess? It was still the Obama years and no one saw Trump coming.
Trump broke him. He became a full on raging MAGAt. He started going to church with military buddies after a lifetime of atheism.
We tried to talk to him, reason with him, and he'd say things like "You're probably right" but then later he'd text some article from the NY Post or whatnot and say we were wrong. We got him off of Facebook, he realized that social media was bad for him, but he was always getting that Fox News disinformation at the base.
Eventually he split from his wife. He's raising their son to be a right winger, and she's raising their daughter in a liberal environment.
There was a moment, just days after January 6th, where he called me late one night. He was clearly scared of what the MAGA movement had done.
Unfortunately, COVID sent him back. He decided that the vaccines were some liberal plot and lockdowns were "proof" that liberals wanted to take over the country and control everyone. He got into anti-vaxx conspiracies and there was no pulling him back out.
We rarely hear from him anymore, but whenever we do it's always about how liberals are going to institute new vaccine mandates or lab leaks or whatever other COVID-related plot he's wrapped up in at the moment.

2023-08-06 14:45:01

Kids go back to brick and mortar schools, locally, tomorrow morning. My wife and I have already heard from 3 families that they all have "the summer sniffles" or their "allergies are really acting up" after back to school shopping earlier in the week.
Each of these families have previously been warned about SARS-CoV-2 by myself from a scientific standpoint, and my wife from the standpoint of a teacher who now works virtually with kids who need to drop out of brick and mortar schools and make up their high school credits online. Not one has changed anything in their lives to deal with the situation.
I've been told "it's over" and "it's mutated to be non-lethal" and "we got shots a couple of years ago" this past week alone, and all I can do is sit, watch, and hope that all of the kids come out fine in the end.
My wife just told me that one parent of one of her high school kids told her that they went shopping for armored backpacks this week, but not masks. It's pretty dystopian, honestly. Good luck out there kids.

2023-06-27 14:13:39

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@npub12ld…d8ag @npub16ew…6fmh @npub1s69…l9l2
I understand what you're saying, but not everything is a scientific paper. This may be part of a larger study, but by itself I wouldn't expect that to be published as a lone review of insurance data. My guess is that he's using the insurance data to check his team's projections, but that's just a guess at this point. As you can see Akimasa Hirata has done other research on COVID infection/reinfection projections. For example:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36992217/
Personally, I'm taking it for exactly what it says until further notice one way or another. Insurance codes show that people are testing positive, on average, every ~4 months in a country where they're still testing. The earlier wave(s) data shows pretty much exactly what we've seen and expected. Dropping to 4 months looks pretty dramatic, but it's definitely not unexpected. If we weren't going about this so backwards in the US we'd be able to verify it with another data set, but that ship's sailed.

2023-06-27 01:57:37

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@npub12ld…d8ag @npub16ew…6fmh @npub1s69…l9l2
While this appears to be unpublished insurance data, the researcher, Akimasa Hirata, is a legitimate COVID researcher who works in this field. If he put his name to it, I'd wager it's correct.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=Hirata+A

2023-03-24 21:08:05

Given that hundreds of thousands of papers have been published in the scientific literature over the last three years about COVID, I highly recommend you stop and think about why one that you may hear about on the news, or covered in CNN, may have gotten there.
It would be a good idea to actually read the paper, before sharing, if you're willing and able.
I see a lot of probably well meaning sharing of information just because a certain paper may gotten on CNN or NBC and they're not always conveying the best information(some papers are better than others) or sometimes what the paper itself was even trying to say in the first place.
Yes, I'm referring to a certain one that's all over today, but, what I wrote will never be wrong.

2023-01-22 01:21:01

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Before it comes up, I feel the need to say, too, that this woman and her husband are college educated, west coast liberals. We're not talking the southern Republicans that I live around. We're so far from having the right discussions around COVID and the future.

2023-01-22 00:38:15

I know I've said it before, but I never try to convince people in my life that COVID's serious anymore. It just always leaves me frustrated.
So, that said, my wife best friend just texted to say she's got COVID for the first time and she knows we "keep up with COVID" and wanted to ask some questions. Sure, no problem.
She was on a flight last weekend and asks if it's possible that she just tested positive now. We tell her that RAT's are supposedly around day 5-11 now, so that's totally possible.
She asks if we know what the workplace rules are for her, and sure we send her a link. She says that's not at all what her boss said, but OK.
She asks if it's even possible to not give her husband COVID. We go over ventilation, filtration, masks, etc and this is where it really starts to go off the rails. She's just like "Yeah, we're not doing any of that."
She asks if long COVID "is real" or if there's anything else she should know and we're like yeah, it is, there's a lot that's unknown. We're sending you some links about what is known with long COVID rates, the things to look out for, what you can try to do in the meantime, etc. and she reads it and goes "Ummm, yeah. That all looks super sketchy. If any of that were real I'm sure the news would be talking about it. I'm sorry but I think you guys have fallen for some hoax or something here. I have a fever, a runny nose and muscle aches. I'm going to take some Tylenol. We have a birthday party to attend tonight, a kid's party tomorrow and my boss wants me back at work on Monday. Thanks anyway."
I give up.