Fabius Maximus:

Joe goes on like this for quite a while. For a more rational report of this news, turn to the NY Times: “N.Y.C. Death Toll Soars Past 10,000 in Revised Virus Count.”

“New York City, already a world epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak, sharply increased its death toll by more than 3,700 victims on Tuesday, after officials said they were now including people who had never tested positive for the virus but were presumed to have died of it. …

“The city and the state have at times differed in their counts of the dead in New York City. As of Monday, the state said that 7,349 had died of the virus in the city. City officials have complained that they are at the whim of the state, which has been slow to share the data it receives from hospitals and nursing homes. The state Health Department explained on its website that the discrepancy is caused by the city and state using ‘different data systems.’”

Fun fact! The NYC numbers were increased on April 14, a city of 8 million increasing its count of fatalities by “more than 3700.” On April 17, China increased its fatality count by 1,290 for a city of 11 million – a proportionally smaller increase. But the journalists reporting the story about China had amnesia about the NYC news from three days ago, although that gives important context for the NYC story.

Also note the effect of the large, complex, and often conflicting reporting systems in China and America. When this causes confusion (or chaos) in the US, it is business as usual. When it happens in China, conservatives growl about those untrustworthy yellow people.

Extremists undermining our society

The final numbers for employment and GDP take over a year to produce in the US, with its vast and expensive accounting apparatus. Expect only unreliable numbers during a pandemic by doctors trying to save lives (including their own), with accounting a lower priority.

Complex phenomena are not counted like apples – whether CPI, GDP, or deaths from COVID-19. The definitions and accounting systems for all of these are constantly in motion, changed to reflect new knowledge and new collection systems. Before test kits were widely available (January in China, April in the US), clinical data was used to distinguish COVID-19 from the flu. Shifting to test kits changed the nature of the numbers.

Dave Gershgorn:

In an attempt to stem the tide of the coronavirus pandemic, at least 30 governments around the world have instituted temporary or indefinite efforts to single out infected individuals or maintain quarantines. Many of these efforts, in turn, undermine personal privacy.

It’s a complex trade-off: Governments need information to create containment strategies and know where to focus resources. At the same time, governments have a way of holding onto tools that undermine citizens’ privacy long after the moment of crisis has passed. Take, for example, the United States’ 2001 Patriot Act, which was passed in response to the 9/11 attacks. The Patriot Act gave the government broad surveillance powers with little oversight, including demanding customer data from telecoms without court approval. Twenty years later, it’s still around.

To document global surveillance measures in response to the coronavirus pandemic, OneZero compiled press reports from more than 25 countries where potential privacy issues are occurring.

The most common form of surveillance implemented to battle the pandemic is the use of smartphone location data, which can track population-level movement down to enforcing individual quarantines. Some governments are making apps that offer coronavirus health information, while also sharing location information with authorities for a period of time. For instance, in early March, the Iranian government released an app that it pitched as a self-diagnostic tool. While the tool’s efficacy was likely low, given reports of asymptomatic carriers of the virus, the app saved location data of millions of Iranians, according to a Vice report.

Bill Frist:

I am a physician and a surgeon who by accident of fate finds himself in the halls of power at a time of dangers for his country and the world, the most compelling of which are exactly those a physician is trained to recognize and fight. To me it seems no more natural to be a United States senator, and in my case the majority leader of the Senate, than it did to Harry Truman, who spent so many hard and unambitious years as a farmer and then found himself in such a place and at such a time as he did. And, like him, as someone who comes from the outside, and for whom the perquisites of power appear strange and irrelevant, I have asked myself what my purpose is as a public servant, what my obligations are, and what high precedents I should follow.

After some thought, I have determined my purpose, I know my duty and obligations, the precedents to honor, and why—neither history nor life itself being empty of example. Just as a surgeon must follow a purely objective course and a general must look at war with a cold and steady eye, a statesman must operate as if the world were free of emotion. And yet, to rise properly to the occasion, the surgeon must have the deepest compassion for his patient, the general must have the heart of an infantryman, and the statesman must know at every moment that the cost of his decisions is borne, often painfully, by the sovereign population he serves—all as if the world were nothing but emotion. The difficulty in this is what Churchill called the “continual stress of soul,” the rack upon which the adherents of these professions, if they meet their obligations well, will of necessity be broken.

In balancing objectivity with emotion, the practical with the moral, the smooth operation of power with its homely and human effects, one is driven to consider first things and elemental purposes, and this consideration makes clear that the guiding star of statesmanship is not aggrandizement of the state or the furtherance of a philosophy or ideology, and neither glory nor ambition nor accumulation of territory or riches. Rather, the guiding star must be the fact of human mortality, and the first purpose of a public official a simple watch upon the walls. We are charged above all with assuring the survival of the nation and protecting the lives of those whom we serve and who have put us in our place, entrusting us with this gravest of responsibilities.

Whether leading a small nomadic band, captaining a ship, or at the head of a huge industrial nation, the task is the same. It is not merely that which can be accomplished with sword and shield, but, rather, the exercise of courage, sacrifice, and judgement, in the preservation of the life of a nation in its people as families and individuals. And as if by design, this task becomes in its execution a principle that unites the powerless and powerful in an unimpeachable equality.

Wu Feng:

It was late at night on Jan. 24, the day after Wuhan went into lockdown, when I boarded a plane bound for the city as part of a 128-member medical support team sent from the southern Guangdong province to the epicenter of China’s COVID-19 epidemic. We received a brief training session the next day, and on Jan. 26, we were taken to the hospital ward where we would spend the next 54 days.

I’ve been a doctor in an intensive care unit for 12 years, and during that time I’ve dealt with all manner of serious diseases. But stepping into that ward was the most terrifying moment of my life.

The cleaning staff and security guards hired by the hospital — most of them contractors — were gone, and the hallways were covered in garbage bags and contaminated medical waste. The ward was staffed by a total of two ophthalmologists and two nurses who were expected to care for 85 critically ill patients in varying degrees of respiratory distress.

Most of these patients should have been in an ICU, not a converted inpatient clinic. That first day, we watched as one of the doctors did their best to save a patient near death. It was no use: The hospital didn’t have enough oxygen left.

Kate Moran:

The more things change, the more they stay the same. 

We recently published the 2^nd edition of our How People Read Online report, almost 15 years after the 1^stedition was published. Looking back over the findings from the 5 eyetracking studies conducted for these editions, we can trace how online reading behaviors have changed (or not).

We’ve been saying this since 1997: People rarely read online — they’re far more likely to scan than read word for word. That’s one fundamental truth of online information-seeking behavior that hasn’t changed in 23 years and which has substantial implications for how we create digital content.

The reason why that finding (and others discussed here) is still true is because it’s based on basic human behavior. Even though massive technology shifts have changed some behaviors, many of our original findings about how people read online remain true, even after 20+ years.

Methodology: Eyetracking

Eyetracking equipment tracks a user’s gaze as she uses an interface. This type of research is valuable for many purposes (including evaluating visual design), but is particularly useful for studying what people do (and don’t) read online.

Most of the studies discussed below contained both a quantitative and a qualitative portion:

Vanessa Thorpe:

An urgent call is to go out to children’s television broadcasters this weekend, backed by major names in British entertainment, politics and technology. Writer and performer Stephen Fry, best-selling author Cressida Cowell and businesswoman Martha Lane Foxare joined by former children’s television presenter Floella Benjamin as signatories to a letter, carried in today’s Observer, that urges all leading streaming, network and terrestrial children’s channels to make one simple change to boost literacy among the young: turn on the subtitles.

If English-language subtitles were to be run along the bottom of the screen for all programming, they argue, reading levels across the country would automatically rise. Longstanding international academic research projects prove, they say, that spelling, grammar and vocabulary would all be enhanced, even if children watching TV are not aware they are learning.

The campaign aims to improve reading ability across the English-speaking world and has won backing from former President Bill Clinton, who said: “Same-language subtitling doubles the number of functional readers among primary school children. It’s a small thing that has a staggering impact on people’s lives.”

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

Ross Anderson:

There have recently been several proposalsfor pseudonymous contact tracing, including from Apple and Google. To both cryptographers and privacy advocates, this might seem the obvious way to protect public health and privacy at the same time. Meanwhile other cryptographers have been pointing out some of the flaws.

There are also real systems being built by governments. Singapore has already deployedand open-sourced one that uses contact tracing based on bluetooth beacons. Most of the academic and tech industry proposals follow this strategy, as the “obvious” way to tell who’s been within a few metres of you and for how long. The UK’s National Health Service is working on one too, and I’m one of a group of people being consulted on the privacy and security.

But contact tracing in the real world is not quite as many of the academic and industry proposals assume.

First, it isn’t anonymous. Covid-19 is a notifiable disease so a doctor who diagnoses you must inform the public health authorities, and if they have the bandwidth they call you and ask who you’ve been in contact with. They then call your contacts in turn. It’s not about consent or anonymity, so much as being persuasive and having a good bedside manner.

Matt Taibbi:

A week of calls to anxious analysts in quarantine identified a series of related issues hanging over the rescue:

“Debt bomb.” The 2008 mess was triggered in part when companies like Goldman, Sachs issued collateral calls against billions in credit default swap contracts it held with insurance giant AIG. When the latter was unable to come up with the money, mayhem ensued, creating wide-scale losses and necessitating an AIG bailout – through which Goldman ended up being paid $12.9 billion. 

The pre-2008 economy was built on a combustible pile of mortgage debt, and bets on mortgage debt, that exploded once banks got nervous and started to call in their money. Some cleaning up of the mortgage markets was done, but Wall Street simply moved elsewhere to build new credit sandcastles, leading to an explosion of corporate debt, securitized commercial loans (CLOs), takeovers, etc.  

One new development involved “subscription lines,” a type of financing of private equity deals, the cheery name we use today for leveraged buyouts. 

When a Wall Street takeover artist wants to raise cash to buy up a company, it goes to big-dollar players – often an institutional investor like a pension fund – and elicits commitments to invest. The private equity fund then goes to a bank, which issues “subscription lines” of financing against the promise of those investors (a.k.a. the “limited partners”). 

Subscription lines have existed for decades, but their use was traditionally limited and short-term, with investors coughing up capital within 30 days. In recent years and especially since 2008, though, the scope of subscription line financing has increased, and the time to repay has also been expanding, to up to five years. 

Making takeovers easier andmore profitable for executives of the Bain Capitals of the world inspired what Barron’s in 2018 described as a “rage” for subscription line financing. This was one of many post-bailout factors inspiring the recent boom in leveraged buyouts: the years 2013-2018 saw the most private equity deals over any five year-period in American history.  

Superhighway98:

Between 1998 and 2003, searching for something on Google was magical. I remember inputting a vague notion like “oil mother’s milk,” and being directed to an interview with Thomas Gold, an astrophysicist who postulated that hydrocarbon deposits refilled themselves because of geological pressure.

Today, if you’re looking for something that is technical, specific, academic or generally non-commercial, good frigging luck. The world’s best information retrieval system has devolved into something reminiscent of 2006-era Digg: A popularity index that’s controlled by a small number of commercially motivated players. They call themselves “SEOs.”

Technical search-engine optimization specialists get a pass: They generally make the web faster, safer and more accessible. “Black hat” SEOs are obvious villains. They boost their own web rankings by breaking the law (e.g. hacking into a website to add links back to their own). But, black hats are the petty criminals of the SEO world. It’s the “white hat” SEOs, the supposed good guys, who are the wolves in sheep’s clothing.

These web marketers have a simple strategy: to squelch competition by concentrating authority. They march behind a banner of legitimacy and self righteousness, and like a totalitarian regime, they believe their end justifies their means. Here are some of the tactics they use:

Chris Edwards:

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) oversees the safety of human and veterinary drugs, biological products, medical devices, foods, cosmetics, and products that emit radiation. The agency also regulates the manufacturing and marketing of tobacco.

During the COVID-19 crisis, the FDA has been more of a hindrance than a help. It put the battle weeks behind by blocking the development of private?sector virus tests, and its regulations have slowed production of hand sanitizer and facemasks.

I noted the other day that FDA employment has soared since 2007. What do all the new employees do? The table below shows that the FDA bureaucracy has expanded across the board.

Total FDA employment increased 79 percent from 2007 to 2019. Part of the increase was due to new activities. For example, the FDA began regulating tobacco with the passage of a 2009 statute and now has almost 900 workers in that function.

Details about FDA’s activities are in this document. One section is titled “Fostering Competition and Innovation,” which is sadly ironic given the agency’s blunder in monopolizing federal control over COVID-19 testing.