Saturday, September 26, 2020

Coronavirus News (242)

Face masks could be giving people Covid-19 immunity, researchers suggest Mask wearing might also be reducing the severity of the virus and ensuring that a greater proportion of new infections are asymptomatic .........  universal face mask wearing might be helping to reduce the severity of the virus and ensuring that a greater proportion of new infections are asymptomatic. ......... universal mask-wearing could become a form of variolation (inoculation) that would generate immunity and “thereby slow the spread of the virus in the United States and elsewhere” as the world awaits a vaccine. ........... the amount of virus someone is exposed to at the start of infection - the “infectious dose” - may determine the severity of their illness .......... “viral load at diagnosis” was an “independent predictor of mortality” in hospital patients. ....... population-wide mask wearing might ensure that a higher proportion of Covid-19 infections are asymptomatic ......... there can be strong immune responses from even mild or asymptomatic coronavirus infection, researchers say that any public health strategy that helps reduce the severity of the virus - such as mask wearing - should increase population-wide immunity as well. ....... even a low viral load can be enough to induce an immune response, which is effectively what a typical vaccine does. ......... In a coronavirus outbreak on a closed Argentinian cruise ship, for example, where passengers were provided with surgical masks and staff with N95 masks, the rate of asymptomatic infection was 81 per cent. This is compared with 20 per cent in earlier cruise ship outbreaks without universal masking. 

Google Maps gets a COVID-19 layer View COVID data as easily as you view traffic or satellite data. ............  COVID-19 data is available for all 220 countries and territories that Google Maps supports, with more detailed state or province, county, and city-level data where available. 

Amy Coney Barrett Is No Ruth Bader Ginsburg When it comes to the Supreme Court, we’ve been to this identity politics movie before. ......... Judge Barrett, who is on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, has impeccable intellectual credentials .......... She has written that abortion is “always immoral” .......... and publicly criticized Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. for voting with the high court’s liberal bloc to uphold the Affordable Care Act, saying he pushed the statute “beyond its plausible meaning” to save it. ........... Make no mistake: Judge Barrett’s confirmation will be the wrecking ball that finally smashes Roe v. Wade and undoes the Affordable Care Act. ......... (Justice Ginsburg was known as the “Thurgood Marshall of gender equality law.”) 


Will Amy Coney Barrett Cost Republicans the Senate? Mitch McConnell has a tricky needle to thread. ........... Democrats are still spitting mad about how Republicans cheated President Barack Obama out of his Supreme Court pick, Merrick Garland, in 2016 — based on some rubbish about how a vacancy shouldn’t be filled during a presidential election year. ......... Since Justice Ginsburg’s death, contributions have come pouring into progressive groups and individual campaigns at a level that political veterans say is unlike anything they’ve ever seen. ActBlue, which focuses on small-dollar donations, pulled in more than $100 million last weekend. ........... over the past decade, Republicans gave up on consensus building and doing “the hard work of passing laws,” and instead are aiming to “have the courts solve our problems.”  


The Meaning of Amy Coney Barrett Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s likely successor could become a different kind of three-initialed icon. ......... as the Notorious R.B.G., she embodied liberal feminism, a history of struggle and achievement condensed into three initials and one life. .......... can there be a conservative feminism that’s distinctive, coherent and influential, at least beyond quirky religious subcultures ............ A conservative feminism today .. takes for granted that much of what Ginsburg fought for was necessary and just; that the old order suppressed female talent and ambition; that sexism and misogyny are more potent forces than many anti-feminists allowed. It agrees that the accomplishments of Barrett’s career — in academia and now on the federal bench — could have been denied to her in 1950, and it hails that change as good. ............... But then it also argues that feminism’s victories were somewhat unbalanced, that they were kinder to professional ambition than to other human aspirations, and that the society they forged has lost its equilibrium not just in work-life balance but also in other areas — sex and romance and marriage and child rearing, with the sexes increasingly alienated from one another and too many children desired but never born. ............. integrate feminist insights with ideas from the old regime about the centrality of marriage, children and religious commitment to the good life. ............ shorter dating lives and earlier marriages, four or five children instead of two or fewer, and other more traditionally coded choices — more frequent churchgoing, denser social networks, living closer to extended family, work lives designed more around home life than the reverse. ........... her claim to any kind of feminism a cheat  

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