Link Log Roundup for May 12, 2020
In this edition: presidential courage, post-pandemic cities, post-pandemic homes, disruptions to HIV care, voluntary surveillance, reopening Iceland, paying the rent, getting sick on the job, disrupting routines, mandatory vaccination, engineered misalignments, jury trials, Census undercounts, open streets, and political investigations.
Your daily look at links I’ve saved to my Link Log (RSS) over the course of each day but didn’t necessarily address or highlight here on the blog. These are the links I logged yesterday, and not necessarily links to things published yesterday.
Trump, the Cowardly Anti-Obama
Why, though? As I said, the link between competence and job approval is overblown. The actual link, I think, is the one between public trust and courage. A president who demonstrates courage—looking for answers, asking for patience, willing to be held accountable for failure—is a president who can inspire broad public trust. The current president, however, cuts and runs, as they like to say on Fox News. (He literally walked away yesterday in the face of hard questioning by women reporters.) A president who demonstrates cowardice like that is a president who inspires broad public distrust.
Rethinking the needs of a post-pandemic city
Transforming streets to better serve people over vehicles is an opportunity not to be missed during the pandemic, and it is not the only one. We must act now to support community resilience; invest in critical infrastructure, including open space; and address long-standing social disparities.
Rethinking ‘home’ post-pandemic - Parlour
The sheer logistics of this shift can be overwhelming. Much of the current advice has been created as a direct response, with news outlets, the internet, and social media all clamouring to offer the best work-from-home solution.1 But for select groups, working from home is the old normal. Looking at the way these people have dealt with, or are actively responding to, these challenges can help stimulate new ideas about what working from home might mean.
When treatment is adhered to, a person’s HIV viral load drops to an undetectable level, keeping that person healthy and preventing onward transmission of the virus. When a person is unable to take antiretroviral therapy regularly, the viral load increases, impacting the person’s health, which can ultimately lead to death. Even relatively short-term interruptions to treatment can have a significant negative impact on a person’s health and potential to transmit HIV.
OHSU to begin notifying Oregonians selected for coronavirus study
OHSU is partnering with the state to conduct voluntary surveillance of 100,000 Oregonians for the next year. Participating residents will be asked to monitor and self-report their symptoms on a daily basis, including temperature and other indicators, such as a cough. People who develop coronavirus symptoms will be eligible for testing.
Iceland Begins to Reopen After Rigorous Testing Helps Contain Coronavirus Outbreak
Over six weeks, Iceland managed to test almost 50,000 people, more than 13 percent of the population, the biggest chunk of any country in the world. DeCODE did not test people already feeling sick or in quarantine, who were tested in hospitals. The company used its facilities to test a cross-section of the population and identified scores of new cases, including people with mild or no symptoms.
But this rosier-than-expected forecast comes with significant caveats. The data for RealPage comes from professionally managed buildings, which tend to have wealthier tenants, and excludes units owned by mom-and-pop landlords. And even though smaller landlords also seem to be doing alright so far, Schriver said after a preliminary look at the survey results, quite a few have made a personal sacrifice to reduce the burden on tenants — temporarily waiving or reducing rents.
As Trump urges reopening, thousands getting sick on the job
Recent figures show a surge of infections in meatpacking and poultry-processing plants. There’s been a spike of new cases among construction workers in Austin, Texas, where that sector recently returned to work. Even the White House has proven vulnerable, with positive coronavirus tests for one of Trump’s valets and for Vice President Mike Pence’s press secretary.
I think the hardest thing for me has been the disruption to my routines. I spent the first couple of weeks sick, just a bad cold or mild flu, but that completely disrupted my running schedule. I’ve also been struggling with anxiety. A lot of my normal running routes are off limits because they have long stretches where they are too narrow to support social distancing, and even on the quieter streets there are people not following the social distancing rules. Since I get stressed out by other people not following rules in general, this is way worse now as others ignoring the social distancing rules actually could be bad for me. I know intellectually that being outside means the odds of picking up the coronavirus are quite small, yet I get a tightness in my chest just thinking about it. Even my source of relaxation and stress relief has become an emotional minefield.
When a Covid-19 vaccine is available, all Americans should get it - STAT
Indeed, 43% of Americans forgo getting vaccinated against influenza. That doesn’t bode well for the highly anticipated vaccine against coronavirus, something that President Donald Trump has said we might have by the end of the year, though others say it will take longer.
Why is this interesting? - The Transmission Edition
So are we all doomed? Did it figure something out that we can’t fix? It doesn’t seem that way. Clearly, moving forward we will have to think about the kinds of changes needed to make the system more robust in these areas. We will likely need “engineered misalignments” to ensure it can hold up against future threats like COVID. For now, though, we did this miraculous thing to kick the whole thing back out of alignment: we all went inside.
Oregon Law Forces Jury Trials To Continue, Increasing Virus Risk
Rather than sitting together in a jury box, the jurors were spread out around the courtroom, occupying the space usually reserved for the public.
The pandemic may leave communities of color undercounted in the census — and cost them billions
If these communities aren’t reached, the implications are vast. The census shapes political representation and the allocation of public funding over the next decade, determining state Electoral College votes, as well as how local, state, and federal legislative district lines are drawn.
These Streets May Stay Open Forever
Among the most visible of these changes — and the ones that may be most likely to become permanent — are the handovers of city streets from private vehicles to pedestrians and cyclists. In thousands of cities in towns, from Portland to Berlin, streets are being closed to vehicular traffic and reclaimed, in the name of public health, by two-wheeled and two-footed humans. The question is, once the health crisis subsides, will these changes remain in place? As London’s walking and cycling commissioner Will Norman put it last week: “We need to come out of this crisis in a radically different way.”
It suggests that the Trump administration really is contemplating legal action against F.B.I. officials who were investigating the attack on the 2016 election. This is unprecedented. More, though, it suggests that the Trump administration does not anticipate a Democratic presidency following this one, since it could expect any precedent it now sets to be used against its own people. That it is willing to weaponize intelligence information from a previous administration suggests it is not concerned that the next administration will weaponize intelligence information against Trump officials. That confidence concerns me.