COVID MEANS NO THEATERS FOR ME

COVID is still out there, with cases rising.

I’ve been hearing great things about the new hit movie TOP GUN: MAVERICK, starring Tom Cruise. I’m not a fan of Tom Cruise, but I was a fan of the original TOP GUN (my younger brother was a U.S. Air Force fighter pilot, so I was at least adjacent to that culture) and this is the kind of movie you really need to see on the big screen. Sadly, TOP GUN: MAVERICK is only being shown in theaters.

But therein lies the problem. I haven’t been inside a movie theater in two-and-a-half years—since COVID made it a life-threatening proposition. For me, the idea of sitting for two hours with a crowd of folks who may or may not be infected/masked/vaccinated/boosted (depending on the stage of the pandemic we’re talking about) just hasn’t been worth it, no matter what’s on the screen in front of me. Even at the times I usually attend showings (matinees in the middle of the week), I figure some fool would sit right behind me in a nearly empty theater and cough on my bucket of popcorn. People did, even before that was something that could kill me. I keep waiting for the pandemic to be “over,” or at least to ease, so I can resume what had been one of the greatest pleasures of my pre-COVID life—watching a new movie in a big, dark theater, with popcorn and everything.

Hollywood has unilaterally decided that the pandemic is over, though clearly it isn’t. The powers-that-be (filmmakers, studio owners, theater owners) are tired of losing money and audiences to the streaming services. They’ve decided to stop releasing new films to theaters and streaming services like HBO Max at the same time, insisting that blockbusters like TOP GUN: MAVERICK, Michelle Yeoh’s EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE and others serve time in theaters only (and then, presumably, for rent on demand rather than by subscription to streaming). Hallelujah! Just like the old days!

Except, excuse me, this pandemic ain’t over by a long shot. You may be tired of it. We may all be tired of it. But cases are rising—six times the number of daily cases this Memorial Day than last. And that is likely a dramatic undercount. Many public health departments have stopped counting. Folks are testing at home—which, I suppose, is a good thing—but they aren’t reporting the results to anyone if they turn up positive. They’re just staying home. Maybe.

Hospitalizations are up, too, especially in the South and West, where vaccination and booster rates are lower. Sure, death rates are down, thanks to the availability of antivirals like Paxlovid (and the fact that many older Americans are vaccinated and boosted, and younger Americans have a better survival rate), but the effects of long COVID still drag down some 10-30 percent of those who catch the disease, impairing heart, brain, gut or lung function.

Here's the thing: COVID is a nasty disease. It’s a survivor. It mutates to survive in a population and insinuates itself into every cell to survive in the body. You can catch it even if you’ve been vaccinated and boosted. You can catch it more than once—like a cold, or the flu. Any one of those infections can result in a devastating case, not a mild case, though your chances are better if you’ve been vaccinated and boosted. Any one of those infections could result in long COVID, meaning you are left with debilitating brain fog or asthma or a heart problem.

So, no, I won’t be going to the theater to see the new TOP GUN: MAVERICK movie. That’s a risk I won’t take. (I can only pray this thing has subsided enough that I can go to see the new AVATAR when it comes out.) I don’t want to catch COVID, even a mild case. In fact, I don’t even want to catch a stupid cold anymore. I still wear a mask in the grocery store, even though everyone else has stopped because they’re “tired of COVID.” Well, you don’t stop running when a wolf is chasing you just because you’re tired. Or because you suddenly don’t see that wolf behind you.

Cautiously, Donna

 *Information for this post provided by: "Coronavirus in the U.S.: Latest Maps and Case Count," The New York Times, June 2, 2022. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/us/covid-cases.html 

 

 

DERECHO CREATES 'IOWA'S KATRINA'

The August 10 derecho had winds over 100 mph. in places.

It’s not enough that we are dealing with a plague that has killed more than 170,000 Americans so far this year, an extreme heatwave and wildfires in California and a burgeoning hurricane season. But the folks in the breadbasket of America, particularly in the state of Iowa, were struck recently with a massive straight-line storm with winds well over 100 miles per hour called a derecho. The storm blasted through parts of five states on August 10, leaving more than 600,000 people without power for days.

The storm flattened 37 million acres of ripening corn and soybeans in the fields, destroying up to one-third of the nation’s corn crop, and devastated homes and businesses in its path. More than 1000 homes in Cedar Rapids, Iowa alone were declared uninhabitable in the storm’s aftermath, blowing off the very roofs over residents’ heads while they tried to shelter from the pandemic. Coronavirus cases reached a new daily high of 832 in Iowa on August 15, in a state where Republican Governor Kim Reynolds has been reluctant to impose restrictions to curb the spread of the disease.

“This is a crisis within a crisis,” said Stacey Walker, a Democrat who serves on the Board of Supervisors for Linn County, which includes Cedar Rapids, referring to the storm on top of the pandemic. “This is Iowa’s Katrina. Literally Iowa was hit with a hurricane-style meteorological event. It seems crazy to say that, but it’s true.”

Government response to the disaster has been complicated—read slowed to a crawl—by several factors. First, a derecho combines the worst characteristics of both a hurricane and a tornado. That is, it can cover the wide swath of territory that a hurricane can, with the high, sustained winds that make hurricanes such a destructive force. As its name implies, a derecho moves in a straight line across that wide swath, the hurricane-force winds pushing out in front of the storm.

But unlike a hurricane, which is slow-moving and therefore predictable with modern technology, a derecho rises as quickly as a tornado and provides little or no warning to the people in its path. And given that its path is so wide, there would be nowhere to go to avoid it except an underground reinforced shelter. 

A derecho much bigger than this one hit parts of five states on August 10.

There was no option for a pre-disaster request from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) for aid, as there might have been with a hurricane. And with cell towers and electrical transmission stations down after the storm, an accurate assessment of the damage was difficult. Still, it was nearly a week before any state request for assistance was made to FEMA and the ball got rolling to help people in need.

The coronavirus pandemic complicates any response, too, in multiple ways. Those in need will be reluctant to go to temporary shelters or food and water distribution points. There will be fewer volunteers, FEMA staff, insurance adjusters and health workers available to help. And people are struggling. 

Genevieve Adams, 48, a single mom with a teenage son, has been surviving on a cup of coffee and one meal a day since the storm destroyed her home. “A week later and we don’t even have food,” Adams said through tears. “It’s a struggle to make it on our own. They could at least have a truck or something out delivering meals.” 

Calvin Ross, 42, a construction day laborer, agreed. He lived in Cedar Rapids during the 2008 flood and remembers aid coming a lot faster. “Someone has to help,” Ross said. “Surely someone.”

In one sign of hope, Governor Reynolds formally requested an expedited Presidential Major Disaster Declaration for Iowa on August 16, including funding for 27 counties for assistance with housing, personal property replacement, medical expenses and legal services, and additional money for debris removal and replacement of public infrastructure in 16 counties.

But former FEMA administrator William “Brock” Long, now executive chairman of Hagerty Consulting, warns, “Expedited major disaster declarations are few and far between.”  Help for the victims of “Iowa’s Katrina” may be a while in coming.

And in the meantime, the wildfires burn in California and yet another hurricane season is brewing in the Atlantic. It’s enough to make you want to take ship for another planet.

With trepidation,

Donna

*Information provided for this post by “‘Iowa’s Katrina’: Help is slow to come for storm-battered state, local officials and residents say,” by Annie Gowen and Frances Stead Sellers, The Washington Post, August 17, 2020. https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/iowas-katrina-help-is-slow-to-come-for-storm-battered-state/2020/08/17/4eac3574-e002-11ea-8181-606e603bb1c4_story.html

         

PLOT BUNNIES FROM THE SCIENCE WORLD

And now for some news from the world of science. Calculating the odds of intelligent life in the universe outside the sphere of our own Earth will be of most interest to SFR authors perhaps, but there are plot bunnies to be found in an item on growing tiny livers in the lab, too. And we may all benefit from a technology that promises the manufacture of a new type of transparent face mask. Read on for more details.

 

The planets exist; now what are the odds of life?

Odds of Sentient Life Better Than 3:2: Scientists have long known that primitive life arose on Earth almost as soon as conditions were stable enough for it some four billion years ago. But the time required for those simple lifeforms to evolve into sentient humans capable of our complex technological civilization required a very long period of time. Given all the factors that affected that journey from no life to sentient life to “advanced civilization,” what are the odds that other such life exists in the universe?

In a paper published this month in the Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences, David Kipping, an assistant professor in Columbia's Department of Astronomy, uses a statistical technique called Bayesian inference to calculate those odds. Initially, the probabilities fall into four main categories: Life is common and often develops intelligence; life is rare but often develops intelligence; life is common but rarely develops intelligence; and, finally, life is rare and rarely develops intelligence.

Kipping then ran the scenarios against each other using data from the geological and biological record of Earth over and over again. This is the essence of the Bayesian inference method, “to weigh the models against each other,” according to Kipping. In the professor’s analysis, based on carbon-13-depleted zircon deposits, life emerged some 300 million years after formation of the Earth’s oceans, a blink of an eye in geologic time. Given similar conditions, the odds are very good that life would emerge in the same way on other planets. 

As far as developing life, then, the odds are good. Says Kipping, “. . . a key result here is that when one compares the rare-life versus common-life scenarios, the common-life scenario is always at least nine times more likely than the rare one." 

Whether that life evolves into complex, differentiated and intelligent forms is more difficult to determine, however, given humanity’s late appearance on Earth’s stage. Kipping puts them at somewhere between 3:2 and 50:50.  He remains optimistic, however. "The analysis can't provide certainties or guarantees, only statistical probabilities based on what happened here on Earth," Kipping said. "Yet encouragingly, the case for a universe teeming with life emerges as the favored bet. The search for intelligent life in worlds beyond Earth should be by no means discouraged." 
 

Tiny Human Livers Transplanted into Rats: Okay, this one sounds like some kind of horror movie plot, but the experiment, performed successfully by scientists at the University of Pittsburgh, may have real benefits for the 40,000 Americans with liver disease, especially the 14,000 waiting for a liver transplant. The scientists converted skin cells donated by human volunteers to stem cells, which can be directed (through the use of hormones and other chemicals) to grow into any type of organ cell in the human body. In this case they were directed to grow into liver cells placed in a “scaffold” of rat tissue stripped of any rat cells, producing livers of a size that could be transplanted into five lab rats specially prepared to receive the tiny, fully functional human livers.

 

The livers did their jobs as human organs would for four days, using a functioning vascular and bile duct network. At the end of that time, the rats were euthanized and analyzed to determine the results. The organs had secreted urea and bile acids as they should have, though there were problems with blood flow and clotting at the graft sites.

The scientists acknowledged there is still a long way to go before the technology is ready for use in human subjects. But the first steps in providing an alternative to transplants of human livers (the supply of which is limited) have been taken.

Swiss Labs Develop Transparent Surgical Masks: Now that we have all learned to smile with our eyes, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL) and the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology (Empa) have come up with a face mask for medical professionals that does its job without obscuring anyone’s lovely smile. Scientists for these labs have devised a mask made from a transparent polymer with pores small enough to block viruses and bacteria, but large enough to allow the wearer to breathe.

Development of the new material began after the 2015 Ebola outbreak, when Klaus Schönenberger, the head of EPFL’s EssentialTech Center, saw doctors and nurses in Africa, covered head-to-toe in protective gear, place photos of themselves on their chests so they would appear more human to their patients. He was looking for a way to humanize the blank face coverings that have become so necessary—and ubiquitous—in this new pandemic, which would also allow the hearing-impaired to read the lips of doctors and nurses caring for them.

The new polymer uses electrospinning to produce a fine, see-through material for the masks. The material is also nearly one hundred percent biodegradable. Funds have already been raised to begin commercial production by 2021, with first priority given to medical professionals.

Cheers, Donna

Information for today’s post provided by: 

“New study estimates the odds of life and intelligence emerging beyond our planet,” Science Daily, May 18, 2020  https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/05/200518162639.htm  

“Tiny Human Livers Grown in The Lab Have Been Successfully Transplanted Into Rats,” by Peter Dockrill, Science Alert, msn.com https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/tiny-human-livers-grown-in-the-lab-have-been-successfully-transplanted-into-rats/ar-BB14Xy00

 

“These Transparent Face Masks Might Make You Feel Normal Again,” by Courtney Linder, Popular Mechanics, June 10, 2020 https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/design/a32823925/transparent-surgical-face-mask/