Hey folks. We’re talking a mulligan this week, as the pedant household has gotten (one by one) whatever fresh COVID-19 variant is going around. Everyone is fine, but being sick left me pretty exhausted over the past few days with fewer productive writing hours available. Since I can’t afford to let the book project slip (and also have to be preparing for classes to start up again shortly) that meant that this week’s blog post (the next part of the Imperator series) didn’t get done in time. That post will come out next week.
My plan is to finish out August and then take ACOUP on a brief hiatus for the month of September to give me a solid block of time where I can be entirely focused on finishing the book manuscript before the deadline is upon me. If all goes well, we’ll be back in October, beginning with some topics I’m going to have the ACOUP Senate over on Patreon voting for over the break.
So, no post this week. But more Imperator next week. Short break in September. And right now – a nap.
No worries. Take care of your family and yourself.
Hope you all feek better soon!
Man, it really sucks how COVID variants are just gonna be a thing for the foreseeable future. Past generations got to see diseases like polio and smallpox disappear. We get to see a new disease becom common.
Hey, some of us got to watch AIDS take off, too!
Though, while less deadly per infection (so far as we know), C19 is a lot more annoying, to those who take it seriously. And maybe more fundamentally worrying: frequent and repeated infections with a potentially disabling disease? Yaaaay…
Regrettably, the CIA screwed up our attempt to wipe out polio, and it looks like it’s sticking around for a while after all.
ISI screwed up the attempt to wipe out polio. Not the CIA. When ISI tortures a doctor into admitting he was collecting DNA on behalf of the CIA and publicizes the confession, years after Jihadists started attacking health workers due to a conspiracy theory that vaccines are a Western conspiracy to sterilize Muslim men, it’s not the CIA that’s to blame.
Common, but probably in the sense of the “common cold”. Which is a catch-all term for I think 204 distinct viruses, many of which were probably the COVIDs of their time (e.g. OC43) but quickly figured out that the optimum evolutionary strategy for an airborne respiratory virus is to make people just sick enough that they can muddle through the day at work or school or whatever, coughing and sneezing on everyone they meet. Killing the host is a loser move in that game.
SARS CoV-2 isn’t quite there yet, but it’s moving in that direction and will probably just wind up as the 205th variety of the now-even-more-common cold.
There is little to no evolutionary pressure against crippling your host long term, or even killing them after the infection period, which for these viruses is as little as 2-3 days. Most of the “common cold” coronaviruses don’t use the ACE2 receptor to infect cells; C19 using it means that drifting virus can infect just about every organ of our bodies.
A crippling virus might induce behavior changes, but since most people are already treating C19 as a common cold and ignoring any long term effects, there is again no selection pressure for the virus to become milder than it is now.
“Viruses become mild” is at best only a vague trend, not a reliable law; if anything, smallpox seems to have gotten deadlier in the more recent centuries of history. (Source: _Pox Americana_.)
Be that as it may, the fact is that COVID has gotten significantly less deadly over the past few years; by now, it’s about as deadly as a nasty strain of the flu.
So, only as deadly as the single largest cause of preventable deaths in any year leading up to the pandemic. I guess we can be optimistic then.
I don’t know if the virus particles themselves are any less dangerous. But by now, the great majority of infections are in people who have had it or vaccination before, and therefore have a degree of acquired resistance, or are children, who were always resilient to a COVID infection.
Yeah, there was maybe a one-time shift to being less acutely dangerous with omicron, gaining more intense upper respiratory activity and infectiousness instead of scarring your lungs. Didn’t have to be an ‘improvement’ but worked out that way. The rest of being ‘milder’ is just almost everyone having some mix of antibodies and memory cells due to their recent infection by a different strain. And it’s _still_ at least as deadly as the worst of a normal flu year, plus the whole “3% chance of getting some form of long covid, even after vaccination and prior infections” thing.
As far as I can tell, C19 is a unique combination of being almost as infectious as measles (high R0), spreading as quickly (in terms of how long it takes to infect someone else) and repeatedly as common colds or flus (2-3 days serial interval, vs. 12 days for measles), and with a chance of taking out random organs in the process due to the cell receptor it uses (no perfect analogy, but maybe polio, which had a pretty low direct fatality rate but might randomly paralyze you too.)
Some diseases (cold, flue, RSV) spread quickly from nose to nose, and repeatedly, but don’t hit hard, (except when flu’s very rapid evolution moves it through a space of being particularly deadly). Some diseases hit hard (measles, smallpox) but have to pass through the whole body, so we only really get it once (or, our memory cells are able to shut down any repeated infection before it gets far.) C19 spreads between noses _and_ hits hard (at least sometimes, often enough to be a bad bet over repeated infections.) I don’t know of any past disease like it. Flu pandemics would be closest, but flu is so mutable in its whole genome that I think it doesn’t keep up its peak lethality (that’s kind of a blind guess, I’m on more solid ground for everything else I’m saying). C19 is highly mutable in the spike protein, but fairly conserved in its other aspects.
While it sucks that we’ve gotten a serious new airborne virus for the first time in awhile, we’re also probably on the brink of a major public sanitation revolution somewhere on par with the development of clean water and sewers. Even with existing engineering mitigations (Filters, UV) it’s possible to clean air fast enough to severely limit viral spread and some emerging tech (Mostly 222nm UV) is likely to be even more effective.
A number of engineering societies are already pushing for improved clean air standards and building codes etc (e.g. ASHREA 241). It hasn’t gotten a lot of political traction (It never hurts to call/email etc… your rep and tell them to support measures in your jurisdiction), but despite that I still expect that two centuries from now people will look back at our ventilation/HVAC setups and feel the way we do about shallow wells next to outhouses.
Technologically, victory over airborne viruses is in sight it’s mostly a question of how many people die of preventable diseases while society/politicians/hospital administratiors etc… drag their feet.
Yeah, the pandemic has taught me many things (though some friends in California already knew them due to wildfire smoke, another clean air issue): N95/KF94 masks _exist_; they can be really effective and comfortable; you can get an air quality monitor for not much money by US middle class standards ($140 for a QingPing, measuring PM2.5 and CO2; I’ve also splurged on more portable CO2 monitors like Vitalight and Aranet 4); you can get a room-sized air purifier for ditto (e.g. Levoit Core 300 for $100, probably not even the best one currently; also “MERV 13 taped to a fan” setups).
Also that particulates are bad for us and the safe level seems to be “none, really”. The safe threshold for PM2.5 keeps getting lowered, and if you look at the EPA AQI formula, it has a very steep slope in the “safe” region, like having even a little particulate is a huge detriment and then after that the damage slows down.
Get better soon sir!
Get well soon!
Best wishes for your recovery Bret. I had a dose of covid in December (my first afaik) – only had acute symptoms for a couple of days, but it totally drained me & left me pretty much flat on my back for a while.
I hope you and your family feel better soon.
May your recovery be speedy!
Readers of this blog may find this morning’s news of the discovery of a previously unknown Roman playing card fort in Wales interesting: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/article/2024/aug/02/humongous-fort-found-in-wales-may-disprove-theory-of-celtic-roman-peace
I actually spent a year living in the area, in Haverfordwest, in the ’00s, and the article mentioned that the first Roman fort in the area was found only a few km outside the town in 2012-2014, seems like now that people are systemically looking it turns out that there are forts hiding in plain sight… the 70-odd page report of the Haverfordwest fort might be interesting if you came here this Friday to get an ACOUP fix, but OGH’s short post this morning is leaving you looking for more:
https://www.dyfedarchaeology.org.uk/wp/discovery/projects/wiston-roman-fort/
Get well soon!
Rest and recuperate.
From Hannibal’s army to the Grande Armee, history’s greatest military forces were often waylaid by disease. It seems that Bret is no exception, cementing his role as a Napoleon- or Hannibal-esque strategist!
(but in all seriousness, hope you & your family feel better soon!)
That’s the story I’ve heard from every person I know who has attended a conference, convention, whatever that’s large and gathers people from all over the country and other countries too, invoving travel and spending time in small(ish) rooms with capacity attendees — they and their spouse come back with covid. Sigh.
Get over it soon!
Hopefully the vaccine for the new variant will be available starting sometime this month.
Using a good mask helps.
“Con crud.” It’s well known in SF circles.
I was at a conference in June and didn’t get COVID. Then again, my mom got it for the first time last month (while I was on a plane to go home and visit her, of all times- those plans had to get scratched), and I have some work mates who got it at a conference a week later.
My first experience with COVID last December, and the biggest stand out symptom (besides a bad cough that i had to get a prescription medication for) was some severe nosebleeds, which is apparently a known symptom although not one of the most common ones.
Feel better soon! This variant is nasty.
Feel better!
Hope you and your household feel better soon!
Sooo, Dan Carlin has a new episode out, for anyone needing a history fix this week. I won’t spoil, but to say it’s on-topic for this blog would be underselling it.
Get well soon, Brett and fam
Statistics! As requested by, uh, at least one person, here are word and post counts for 2024 up to and including July.
Like any good software project this took a bit longer than expected. Any problems, please let me know.
Most startling result is that in June Prof Devereaux was not the top contributor, and in July he only regained the top spot through the Cunning Plan of disabling comments on his 5th July post.
https://scifihughfacoup.z13.web.core.windows.net/
Heavens, and I thought I was spending too much time in the comments sections here!
Even taking into account the possibilities that other commenters here might have had no other websites where they think they should spent less time writing comments in, and they might take less time per comment because they spend less time double checking their grammar or rereading random information they assumed was relevant, I would not have expected others to come up with such enormous word counts…
Glad to see that I’m never in the top ten.
Disabling comments on that 5th of July post was definitely the right decision, both for Prof Deveraux and for the rest of us, since I think a lot of us would have found it infuriating enough to waste a ton of time responding……
all of us in the top 10 spend too much time arguing politics on the internet, and we should be ashamed of ourselves.
Take care man. This “novel coronavirus” thing is really something. They oughta make a law against it.
FYI Bret, the email for this landed in my Gmail spam with a warning that “this message is dangerous, it contains a suspicious link that was used to steal people’s personal information.”
I will take this opportunity to lobby you. Do a series on HBO’s Rome! It’s great TV plus it gets a lot of stuff right and a lot of stuff badly wrong.
I would really like to see a historian just go to town on that show’s decisions for depicting Servilia.
Like the others here I wish you luck, a speedy recovery, and good health, Bret Devereaux.
Also am I the only one for whom notifications are acting super weird lately?
First, in March, email notifications stopped working, though I recall others also had that problem. Then after a long period in which I was incapable of noticing whether anybody had replied to me, I had found out that my notifications could also be found on the website of WordPress at the page, https://wordpress.com/read/notifications, so I could again find out whether people reacted to one of my comments. Then those notifications on the WordPress website also stopped working with no new ones appearing. Finally, previous week I started receiving email notifications again which have not yet appeared on the WordPress website.
Well, a week without ACOUP is like a week without sunshine or historishine or something, but getting your book finished is kinda important. I’m hoping to get a copy of my own when it’s available … borrowing a copy from the library isn’t the same thing at all.