Anonymous. (2019, Nov. 5) One world order technocrats have already taken over your local school board.CodeRedPillPatriot.net. Last accessed 2nd March 2020.
Editorial Board. (2020, April 2) Always do your own research! After combing the data, we can only verify three people worldwide who have actually died from the coronavirus.CoolRanchLiberty.kp/Kermitmemes. Last accessed 5th April 2020.
Author. (2020, March 25) Most people aren’t smart enough to see the truth disguised in chaos.Original Joker meme, author’s personal Instagram page. Last admired three days ago.
Russell, S. (2020, Jan. 5) “You see, this is the problem with…”A 6-hour diatribe my buddy Steve filmed on his flip phone while sitting in his truck in the Dollar Store parking lot. He asked me to put it on the internet, but until such time I can finish my online coding course and invent a more secure video hosting website, it must remain on a USB drive that I won as a door prize at the grand opening of the local trampoline park, as Steve exposes too many of the deep state’s mysteries and stratagems. Last viewed at breakfast.
Dick, G. Donkey (2020, April 16) The models that the mainstream media are using are based on bad assumptions and even worse math. Here’s why…Comments section of “Amateur MILF with smart glasses,” Pornhub.com. Last accessed 15 minutes ago.
@SirachaTruthBombs (2020, March 28) These hospitals you see on TV, they’re all empty, bro! #thread 1/657.Twitter.com. Last accessed 22nd March 2020.
Anonymous. (2020, April 8) Explainer: Why using Chik-fil-A sauce to mark your door with the sign of ‘Q’ is crucial to saving your first-born from the Clintons-Oprah sex cult.ScreaminPatriotBlaze.tennis. Last accessed during one of the big Jew holidays.
Trollgon, VidMoney$, Mooot & Siccck00. (2020, April 5) Gone but never forgotten: BigDump666 was the best of us.Thread in honor of Big D, who helped uncover the global COVID-19 conspiracy only days before he drowned (false flag) trying to destroy the true cause of the disease — the cellphone antennas on his town’s water tower, r/EpsteinLives, Reddit.com. Last accessed 9th April 2020.
Anonymous. (2020, April 12) Follow the money! Timothée Chalamet and COVID-19 came from the same Soros-funded lab in China.XxtraFlaminHotFreedoms.bible. Last accessed 7th April 2020.
Lightening, S. (2020, April 13) “No, you’re not crazy. Bill Gates is literally waiting on the other side of your shower curtain holding a giant needle full of vaccine, a large drop ominously suspended on the tip.”Sweet Lightening Freedom Fighter’s YouTube channel. Last accessed during evening prayers.
Nave, J. (2020, March 22) This is why we dig! The government knows where you live, but they don’t know the location of your secret hole. See you on the other side, gentlemen.Secret Hole Facebook Community, Facebook.com. Last accessed 10 minutes ago.
Anonymous. (2019, Dec. 12) Your wife and children didn’t leave you. They were compromised.BajaBlastChemtrails.edu. Last accessed Christmas day.
by Lekshmi Santhosh, Michelle Sharp, Nancy Stewart, and Gretchen Winter
Intensive Care Unit Physicians at Univ. of California-San Francisco Johns Hopkins University University of Kansas University of Alabama
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This essay is part of our new series, Flattened By the Curve, which features the voices of doctors, nurses, healthcare workers, and others on the front lines against COVID-19. For information on how to submit, click here.
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Many of the narratives in the media around physicians caring for COVID patients have focused on predominantly male physicians without significant childcare responsibilities. This piece is an inside glimpse of a real-time text chain of four women critical care physicians across the country caring for COVID patients and navigating their dual identities as women in medicine.
Week 1
“I’m doing better with morning sickness, just tired. Coronavirus is keeping me busy. My immunosuppressed patients are worried.”
Week 2
“We had our first case this weekend but was well enough to discharge.”
“I’m in clinic right now and we have another covid case that just showed up in the clinic. Be well, friends.”
Week 3
“Everyone here is basically ignoring social distancing. It’s making me really mad.”
“I had to cancel my trip in two weeks. I’m super sad.”
“It’s ok to grieve. We had to cancel baby’s first birthday party and lots of family flying in.”
“We are cancelling all the clinics we can and moving to Tele-medicine.”
“Our N95s are under lock and key. We know we will run out. I’m scared, but I’m more nervous that I’m going to pass it to my patients before I know I’m sick. I don’t think I’ll ever get over that if I do.”
“We are sheltering in place. We are going to try splitting each day — one half one person works and other is with kids and then switch.”
“Kids have been in Daddy Day School all day — schools closed for the rest of the year.”
Week 4
“I am having anxiety about being around patients if we don’t have enough PPE.”
“Yesterday literally had 9 hrs of COVID meetings but today was better bc could only work half the day!”
“We have opened up a fifth ICU service to cover for now — when we need it — and we are prepared as can be expected. This is all just so terrifying.”
“Text I got after I told an NP her COVID PUI not going to get a bronch: thanks for assuming I’m not the faculty and that my faculty is male.”
“My patient texted my nurse and said can’t wait to meet the doctor and get HIS opinion. Surprised who popped up on video visit? :)”
Week 5
“Potty training: A small bit of normal life making me feel less anxious today.”
“Aww nice! We were fully potty trained but now regressing haha.”
“They won’t test me until I have symptoms.”
“We’re not far behind Italy.”
“I’ve asked my boss if I’m allowed to go work in NY.”
“I feel like everyone is needed at home or I’d go.”
Week 6
“Just got tested. I’m trying really hard not to freak out. Have had a sore throat and runny nose.”
“I’ve had a sore throat, too. But even if you are positive (which you may not be) there’s a ~90% chance you’ll be fine!”
“I totally sympathize. Sore throat and cough this morning, pretty sure from kiddos, but starting work at ICU…”
Week 7
“Wish me luck for COVID ICU! Those fellowship scrubs don’t fit the same way they did 2 kids ago! Did you wear a white coat at work or just scrubs? Did you tell your neighbors that you will be exposed?”
“Rothy’s are a good idea. I was just going to ditch my sneakers.”
“I start nights in two days…meal prepping now.”
“Are you doing any quarantine from kids/family?”
“No, and still nursing and pumping and kissing them!”
“My partner’s good. He decided he wanted to be around me until one of us has symptoms because not seeing each other for months was too hard. But otherwise we’re distancing from the rest of the world.”
“What a way to get brought into the medical family world <3 #ThanksNoThanksCOVID”
“Be safe my friend”
Week 8
“Sorry, was doing bedtime with baby. Things are okay on my end. I’m being asked to do more at work.”
“Ladies. Crap day. Baby woke up every hour overnight because she misses me. Got home late from ICU and baby was already asleep and toddler had epic tantrum on potty and sitter canceled for tomorrow.”
“I am surprised at how much toddler is aware of what is going on. He keeps saying, ‘You cannot go outside because bad virus.’”
“Hang in there. You’re an amazing doc and mama <3”
Week 9
“Happy Birthday!”
“Thank you sweet friends <3 I miss you all and can’t wait until we can reunite and have a massive group hug.”
“Are you all seeing PE with COVID?”
“I coughed some last night and started to panic but it went away and I was able to do 21 miles on the bike so I’m probably fine.”
“My bro begged me to wear my N95 all day because of some studies showing aerosolization. Just to be safe.”
Week 10
“My boss called me today and asked me if I”m willing to go to NYC.”
“Sending you a lot of love. I can send you my N95 in the mail if it will help.”
“#shero.” “I have my ultrasound and instead of being excited, we’ve been discussing the safety of me going and how my husband cannot come.”
“Did you guys see that tweet? I have heard a lot from female colleagues about how mental load is even worse than usual for women during this pandemic.”
“Should we write an article on being women ICU doctors during this time of COVID?”
COVID-19 has taken many things from us so far. It has taken lives, freedom, and a sense of safety. The work of a physician is never easy and the work of a physician during COVID-19 even less so. Female physicians face unique challenges that can add to their physical and emotional burden, but they can also be a source of great strength and compassion in the medical field. We must hear their voices and listen. Only then can we support them. Only then can we truly thrive.
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Dr. Lekshmi Santhosh is a Pulmonary, Critical Care, and Hospital Medicine physician practicing in San Francisco. She lives with her husband and two babies under 3. She thanks you all for reading and sheltering-in-place and flattening the curve.
Dr. Michelle Sharp is a Pulmonary Critical Care Physician in Baltimore, MD. She lives with her husband and toddler and her family is expecting a new arrival this summer. She and her family thank you for staying at home to flatten the curve.
Dr. Nancy Stewart is a Pulmonary, Critical Care, and Sleep Medicine physician practicing in Kansas City. She is married with two toddlers. While sheltering-in-place, she continues to see patients via telehealth to keep her patients safe and at home.
Dr. Gretchen Winter is a pulmonary and critical care physician in Alabama who is currently volunteering in NYC and wearing a mask. When not in a hotel she lives with six fur babies (who are also not fully potty-trained).
It’s been a minute, right? A few months ago, you were talking smack about my year in a cabin. Now you’re trapped in your condo in Yonkers or the backside of Amherst or wherever, and you’d trade it in a heartbeat for 150 square feet and a whole forest full of owls and frogs and shit.
Don’t play dumb, bruh. You’ve spent most of your short career trash talking me. Every damn fall, you tell your first-year Am Lit seminar that I’m completely full of shit. You stand there in your goddamned tweed jacket with the suede elbow patches, and tell the kids how my experiment in self-reliance was all just a sham. Then you angle your head just so, and say something snarky about “performative solitude” or “cabin porn.” And for the coup de grâce, you proclaim that I was never really alone at Walden Pond, because I had regular visitors.
Bitch, I disclosed my visitors — I wrote a whole damned chapter called “Visitors.” Can’t blame me if some debutante from Darien didn’t read it. And who’s entertaining visitors now? Not your quarantined ass.
So sue me if my social distancing included regular visits from a Canadian woodchopper and multiple half-witted men from the almshouse. You, my friend, are leading a life of quiet desperation, where your only contact outside of Zoom is a fast-food delivery guy who you pay by app.
And yes, I did walk into Concord from time to time. Sometimes a man’s got to take care of bidness. And sometimes a man’s got to bring his dirty laundry home to his mother. Your students found that real funny. But they’re not laughing now that they’re back home in Bergen County.
Hey, I get it. Life has changed! Before the coronavirus, you were busy with this and that and the other, plus faculty meetings. Back in 1840s Concord, it was the same shit, but worse. Imagine that instead of that prissy early modernist who just lateraled over from Colgate, your local competition was Ralph Waldo Emerson, Louisa May Alcott, and Nate Hawthorne. Jesus, the pressure was unbearable.
That’s why I said to myself, “H-Dog, this ain’t life. You’ve got to live deliberately, front only the essential facts of life, and see if you can’t learn what it has to teach. Ditch all the bullshit!” So I built my crib in the woods. The material only cost me 28 bucks and twelve-and-a-half cents, and that included considerably more hair than I actually needed.
Now you’re stuck in your 1BR/1BA with Corian countertops. True, it’s bigger than my cabin. But here’s the thing, Einstein: I didn’t spend the entire two years indoors. Mostly, I was by myself, just vibing. But whenever I wanted, I could check out Flint’s Pond or the Baker Farm or whatever. Hell, I even planted a bean field.
And let’s talk about On the Duty of Civil Disobedience. You don’t really like this essay, and you wish those jackasses over at Poli Sci — or even the beardos in Philosophy — would cover it instead. But you know that Gandhi and King dug it. And you want your students to think you’re cool. So you assign it and then open up class with that one time Bernie got arrested at a civil rights protest back in ’63. Here’s the thing, though: you yourself would no sooner spend a night in jail than spend a summer hoeing beans. (And you were secretly for Warren.)
Look, I know you’re stressed about this pandemic. But I’ve been there, too. Worried about getting sick? I died of consumption, aggravated by a cold that I got from that douchebag Bronson Alcott — who, I shit you not, caught it at a teacher’s conference. Worried about falling behind on your work? I kept Homer’s Iliad on my table for an entire summer, but I barely had time to read two pages, what with all the bean-hoeing. Worried what you’ll do if your tenure app is denied? My Plan B was making pencils.
So cut the crap. If there’s anything I learned on Walden Pond, it’s that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. In other words, nut up and build your castles in the air! And don’t ever fucking diss me again.
— Ya boi H
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Read an interview with author Ron Fein about writing this piece over on our Patreon page.
It is with deep regret that we must inform you that the order you placed at 6:46 pm at Buffalo Wild Wings has been processed, prepared, and is now on its way to your desired address.
At this time, there is no recourse or appeal process at your disposal to change this result. The damage is done. And as a trusted friend, companion, and the third-party delivery app of your choice, it pains us to have to deliver this news.
We realize your inevitably subpar experience will ultimately be associated with our service, but we’re not going to go down without a fight. We can’t fix what is broken, but we still feel a certain obligation to inform you of what you can expect to happen now.
In your almost assuredly sedentary state, we can understand that there may be a certain catharsis involved when it comes to ordering food from a restaurant most commonly associated with loud MMA fights and sticky Golden Tee machines. But we can assure you that whatever majesty you may personally experience from the atmosphere Buffalo Wild Wings presents does not transfer over to the culinary experience you’re about to have.
It didn’t have to be this way. Despite filtering establishments serving wings by distance, and having no fewer than 13 other seemingly superior options, you went with Buffalo Wild Wings. Not only was it the furthest away from your residence, but this location was also the lowest-rated by nearly a full half star. Even without the extended distance, it’s abundantly clear the delivery process is not kind to a product that must be extremely crispy and/or hot in some capacity for one to glean any kind of enjoyment from it.
And so we just have to ask again, why?
There was no special deal available at this location. No new menu items of note. And, in general, there was nothing proprietary about your order that a closer, more highly rated establishment couldn’t have fulfilled. Your wings were not tossed in the mango habanero sauce many frequently choose. Nor the Caribbean jerk or even lemon pepper rub for that matter. You, out of the dozens of sauces available, chose “mild.” Only mild. For all 50 wings. Of course, we’re grateful for your support of restaurants during this difficult time, but given the multitude of worthy options at your disposal, what the fuck?
We would never say we were disappointed in a valued customer’s decision making. That is not what we’re doing here. Frankly, we’re just concerned. You’re better than this. Last week you tried the Poke Palace — what happened to that Gary? We want to know.
It isn’t always going to be like this. This unusual moment in history will eventually pass, and one day just be a distant memory we all share. What we’ll be left with is our reflections on what we did during this time when Earth seemingly stood still. Our grandchildren will one day ask us what it was like to live through this period in history — what we were like. We hope you’re able to eventually come to terms with the fact that, now and forever moving forward, this will be part of your story.
NEPHROLOGIST/ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF MEDICINE COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY IRVING MEDICAL CENTER NEW YORK, NY
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This essay is part of our new series, Flattened By the Curve, which features the voices of doctors, nurses, healthcare workers, and others on the front lines against COVID-19. For information on how to submit, click here.
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Dr. Klemmer’s email finally broke me. His message arrived when I’d already been consulting on kidney failure cases in my hospital’s intensive care units for a week. Each day I’d start four or five more patients with COVID-19 infections on dialysis. Most of these patients followed the same course: admitted to the hospital with fever and mild respiratory distress, acute decompensation a few days into their hospitalization requiring rapid transfer to the ICU for intubation, and then a call to my service 24 hours later because their previously healthy kidneys had just failed. We were running low on dialysis machines and anticipated a shortage that would be just as dire as the shortage of ventilators that dominated the news cycles. None of this broke me, however. I didn’t cry until I opened Dr. Klemmer’s email, addressed to both my wife and me. Xenia and I met during our second month of residency, when Dr. Klemmer was our attending on the inpatient kidney service. He eventually would become my mentor, the reason I chose nephrology as a career.
“Me telling the two of you to ‘stay safe’ is like you telling me I can win the NYC marathon by just moving my legs faster,” his email began, “but I truly wish you to be safe.” I smiled, as much for the assurance that Dr. Klemmer’s sense of humor was intact in a time of crisis as for the simple feeling of knowing he cared about us. Then came the line I could not stop reading over and over, the line that made me burst into tears in front of my laptop and kept me crying later that night in my bathroom. The line that clouded my vision the next morning on the drive into work. The line that still haunts me almost a month later: “You did not sign up for this.”
I’ve thought long and hard about why this sentence shook me so deeply. The answer lies in what “this” means. I assume Dr. Klemmer meant we didn’t sign up for a job that potentially puts our own lives at risk. I understand where that sentiment comes from, particularly in light of all the horror stories of limited personal protective equipment (PPE) circulating on the news and across social media. My Facebook and Twitter feeds are filled with physicians talking about sleeping in different bedrooms from their partners, avoiding cuddles with their children, and adjusting their wills in case they catch COVID-19. Xenia and I are lucky to work at hospitals that have not run out of PPE and have wisely put in practices that protect their healthcare workers from unnecessary COVID-19 exposures. “You did not sign up for this” did not break me because I feared for my own health, because I don’t.
In the COVID-19 climate, “this” could mean a number of things I didn’t sign up for when I started medical school 21 years ago. I never signed up for a job that involved convincing older colleagues not to come into work. I never signed up for a job that diluted the doctor-patient encounter to a video visit or, when the internet didn’t cooperate, a phone call. I never signed up for a job that forced babysitters to say they didn’t feel comfortable coming to my home to watch my three small children. But none of these things I didn’t sign up for are why I cried when I read Dr. Klemmer’s email.
The “this” I didn’t sign up for is losing. I was only a week into treating the surge of COVID-19 patients that was expected to double and then triple over the following two weeks and already seeing the limitations of my profession. The tens of thousands of deaths predicted in the United States due to COVID-19, it turned out, would not be due to healthcare workers, like me, simply not having enough machines, medicines, staffing, space, and time to save patients who, in different circumstances, could probably be saved. My original fear was we’d lose patients because we had to ration care, but I’ve been amazed by how my hospital has been able to administer extraordinary care under the most extreme conditions. The fear that was already disturbing me when I read Dr. Klemmer’s email and plagues me still is that we’re battling a foe stronger than us.
The “this” I didn’t sign up for is watching my chosen profession fail. I cried when I read Dr. Klemmer’s email because I saw it happening already, and it continues to happen despite our best efforts. I’ve seen a recurring meme on Twitter and Facebook of a doctor wearing scrubs and a white coat, but with Superman’s “S” logo bursting out from the doctor’s chest. In truth, doctors like me are not Superman. We are Clark Kent. We are smart and nerdy and kind and hard working. We signed up for 18-hour days in the hospital and weekends where we might only see our children for 10 or 15 minutes. We signed up for exhaustion and frustration, fatigue, and heartbreak. But we also signed up knowing that medicine should prevail in the end. Even if we are Clark Kent and not Superman, our field, like a superhero, should be guaranteed a victory just by the nature of the narrative. The COVID-19 crisis has put that narrative into doubt. That is why Dr. Klemmer’s email broke me.
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Andrew Bomback is an associate professor of medicine at Columbia University Irving Medical Center and the author of Doctor (Bloomsbury/Object Lessons).
Nurse, Medical Intensive Care Unit University of Colorado Hospital Denver, Colorado
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This essay is part of our new series, Flattened By the Curve, which features the voices of doctors, nurses, healthcare workers, and others on the front lines against COVID-19. For information on how to submit, click here.
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The future tense lost all credibility on March 23rd, 2020. It was on that breezy Monday that I tested positive for COVID-19 and about the time when, for many Americans, the future tense, like local businesses, became empty and in need of support. No one spoke about the future safely.
Things will be normal again?
We will survive?
Those words struggle to grow roots.
My time with COVID-19 was defined less by my symptoms and more by anxiety. I had a tiny spare room, access to unlimited news coverage, and plenty of time to fully and comprehensively freak out. Every news story was present tense: the death tolls, the lockdowns. It was like deciding to meditate for the first time after tumbling into shark-infested water. Sure, you’re in the moment, but the moment is terrifying.
Now, weeks later, the future tense is still a minefield. I returned to work as an ICU nurse, but for some of the patients in our three COVID ICUs, mostly the elderly and the otherwise ill, there will never be a future tense again.
Anecdotally, people identify a peaceful death to occur in their sleep, surrounded by loved ones. Instead, patients with COVID-19 only see their family on a phone. Sleep is also rare, so most get a simulacrum of rest — the type that comes from morphine and mu-receptors. Administering their morphine, I feel like they’re on fire and my water jug contains gasoline — they’re just different types of accelerants.
The current pandemic reveals by magnification the holes in our healthcare system. Minorities are often more vulnerable to illness. People lose their jobs and their health insurance. The wealthy can easily purchase tests that are being rationed amongst thousands. We neglected primary care and mental health and now illness is here to collect our debt.
These problems are not new to the ICU, but the rain has turned to rivers. I am concerned that when the sky clears we’ll doff our waterproof jackets, glance back at those washed away, and continue to allow people to lift their heads only as high as the money they can stand on.
These circumstances make me marvel at how privileged we are most of the time. How we use the future tense so confidently, as if it wasn’t simply our words dissolving into ether.
We built a healthcare system that can treat a deadly diabetic emergency blindfolded — practically by algorithm — but still gets flop sweats talking about affordable daily insulin. Coronavirus is the shark, but as a nurse I can assure you that before the news arrived to cover a new predator, socioeconomically disadvantaged people were drowning in the same water. I think that if acceptance is admitting there’s a new threat, hope is the belief we’re more capable together than if we scatter. Hope is an equitable healthcare system that restores the future tense to our side, strong and full of swagger, to tell us we will survive. We will be OK. And we will believe it.
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Jason Hayes is an ICU nurse currently working in a COVID-19 ICU in Denver.
Internet for Christians: Everything You Need to Start Cruising the Net Today
Schultze
1998
Evidently this book is the secret to a more sanitized Internet.
In actuality, it really is a guidebook for Christian oriented sites. Regardless, since this is about the Internet circa late 1990s, I think we can safely let this go.
These subject/group specific books were all the rage as people were starting to navigate the web. Now it seems ridiculous that one would use a book to guide them to certain sites. They would be out of date before they even went to a publisher.
CVCC, Cardiac Intensive Care Unit, RN Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center Lebanon, NH
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This essay is part of our new series, Flattened By the Curve, which features the voices of doctors, nurses, healthcare workers, and others on the front lines against COVID-19. For information on how to submit, click here.
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I am not a soldier. I am a nurse. And I am not “on the front.” I am the front.
I have coronavirus. Had, I guess. A mild case. Home recovering, not sick enough to be a patient but too sick to be at work. I walk twenty steps to the bathroom and my heart rate is 130 beats per minute.
Thirty-eight days since exposure, and I’m waiting to hear if I qualify for short-term disability.
My boss sent me an email this morning. She said if I don’t qualify, I will be required to return to work. To the front. If I refuse or am unable, they will consider my position to be resigned, best wishes for my health and future. I walk up nine steps to the bedroom and my heartrate is 150 bpm, and I’m gasping for air. No ICU in the country will employ me. I can’t pass a physical.
But you wanted news from the front. I’m trying to write from there, but the front of my mind isn’t on the coronavirus. I don’t want to talk about COVID-19, or the smell of plastic, or the metal whir of the drills when they were building the COVID unit, or the way uncertainty coated every surface despite the Purell and the gowns and the gloves and the mask.
I want to talk about blankets — soft fibers tightly woven, the warmer stacked with them, the way I layered them on my patients for their comfort, and now mine. I can’t feel the fibers under gloves. I want to talk about soup. About mixing broth and pepper and dehydrated vegetables and noodles in the kind of alchemy that occurs only at 2 a.m. when neither of you can sleep: my patient, queasy yet craving warm comfort, and me, holding vigil. But I can’t smell soup through an N95. In fact, I can’t smell much, anymore.
But you asked for news from the front.
Another email from work. Occupational Medicine requires an update on my status. But I don’t want to talk about the way my joints burn, how my heart lurches sideways in my chest when I sit up, how I sleep best elevated on two pillows. I am a nurse. I have coronavirus.
My friend texted me from Detroit, angry. They are out of body bags. Not a single patient he has touched in over two weeks has survived. His tears leak through the spaces between the words.
I wish I could help. I lay in bed, propped on two pillows, exhausted from the act of being awake, eating a meal, breathing. I wish I could help. I wish I could give you news from the front.
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Eve is an RN who has worked in critical care for over a decade. You can find them on twitter @browofjustice, where they almost never post about being a nurse, except when they have something important to say. Their most difficult work before now is “I Will Not Cry,” an open-access journal article available through Annals of ATS.
Three weeks after Capt. Brett Crozier was relieved of his command of a coronavirus-infected aircraft carrier by a Navy official who has since resigned, top Navy brass want him back on his ship.
(Image credit: Petty Officer 3rd Class Nicholas/U.S. Navy via AP)
Dyson’s plan to make ventilators for the UK during the COVID-19 pandemic is over almost as quickly as it began. The company has halted its efforts after the country told it the CoVent breathing devices are “not required,” according to a statement from founder James Dyson to Engadget. He added that his firm would “not accept any public money” despite spending £20 million (about $24.7 million) on the project, but he also hoped that the ventilator would be useful in other countries with “time and investigation.” You can read the full statement below.
The businessman told staff that only a quarter of available ventilators in the UK were in use, according to the BBC. The UK government’s Cabinet office hasn’t made any decisions so far about using any newly developed ventilators.
The pause comes after some reported drama surrounding Dyson’s late March announcement. Telegraphsources said that Dyson’s announcement had sparked “fury” in the Prime Minister’s office as it preempted plans to outline a strategy to boost the National Health Service’s capacity. Effectively, Dyson may have been “point-scoring” for publicity’s sake, promising a giant order even though it needed regulatory approval to move forward.
As Dyson said, this doesn’t mean CoVent is gone. Countries hit harder by COVID-19, such as the US, might still need it. And a lack of demand is clearly a good thing at a time when many are still worried that hospitals could be overwhelmed by coronavirus patients. However, the decision to put manufacturing on hold may hurt Dyson’s reputation. This comes just months after company scrapped its electric car project in the fall — it’s not having much success outside of core categories like vacuum cleaners and hair dryers.
The University of Oxford’s Big Data Institute advised the NHS this week that “a contact-tracing app could help stop the coronavirus pandemic, but 80 percent of current smartphone owners would need to use it.”
Can you imagine trying to get 80 percent of Americans, from the privacy and security aware to coronavirus “truthers,” to download a tracking app? I mean, it would be really good if I got an alert letting me know I was near someone who tested positive -- for myself and the people I care about. My plan is for us to live through this. But I have massive surveillance PTSD from Big Tech’s consent allergies, and yesterday the federal government's team lead used a press briefing to suggest using an "injection" of disinfectant into people infected with COVID-19, NBC News reported, "as a deterrent to the virus."
Plus, I think everyone sucks at security and few things are as bad as app security. I know this can be done right. I understand the security, privacy and cultural constraints of how to make a contact tracing app successful while not trampling our human rights. But does anyone pushing us to the inevitability of contact tracing apps get it?
That said, contact tracing apps are not just unavoidable; we desperately need them. They’re already in use in different countries, yet implementation is slow for Western countries. Basically, we’re next.
Contact tracing is when health workers stem the spread of a disease by locating an infected person, documenting where they went and with whom they came into contact then finding out if those people have symptoms, and determining potential testing and quarantine. It has been used all over the world when fighting contagious infectious diseases like Ebola. Right now, contact tracing with quarantines and widespread, accurate testing are absolutely vital in stopping the COVID-19 pandemic.
The phrase “contact tracing” as we know it online has become a catch-all for digital alternatives, such as apps that reduce risk time, minimize everyone’s exposure and save lives.
It could also save a lot of money; our economy is bleeding out before our eyes. But it’s also not cheap to implement. “Contact tracing on a national level could cost in the billions of dollars and require hiring more than 100,000 people,” NBC News reported.
"Every clinician in the city who cares for someone with COVID-19 and every laboratory that processes a positive test must report the case to the Department of Public Health, which is how San Francisco is building out its database of contacts," NBC further explained. The implementation of contact tracing is labor- and time-consuming:
San Francisco plans to use a workforce of 140 people, including medical students from the University of California, San Francisco, librarians and staff from the city attorney’s office, to go through lists of people who have tested positive for the virus and interview them.
While SF gears up for at least 140 people for its 883,000 citizens, on Wednesday California Governor Gavin Newsom announced that the state is readying to train up to 10,000 contact tracers.
San Francisco’s health department is employing the use of software for its contact tracing, though that software is used by the tracers themselves to track and monitor people’s cases. It’s not being forced on the city’s population. On Monday SF’s public health director, Dr. Grant Colfax, told press that “participation in contact tracing is voluntary and no one will be asked about their immigration status or for their Social Security number or bank details.”
That’s reassuring from a privacy and anti-surveillance perspective, which is the aspect filling so many of us with crushing dread. Make no mistake, we’re talking about an event — the coronavirus pandemic — creating an opportunity for a worldwide digital security and privacy apocalypse. We can be sure that the dictators and data dealers are all salivating over all that Big Brother brand toothpaste that can never be put back in the tube.
That’s probably what brought the DP-3T Project, a group of digital security and privacy professionals, to publish an astonishingly comprehensive report this week: The Privacy and Security Risk Evaluation of Digital Proximity Tracing Systems. In it, they plainly explain that all contact tracing apps use Bluetooth to estimate proximity between two phones, and all the system needs to do is inform the phone’s owner they’ve been near an infected person. “The system does not need to reveal to anyone who the potential contagious contact was with, or when and where it happened.”
The report goes on to list risks everyone will need to know about. That includes the potential for app makers to abuse all the data (including access to people’s social graphs), that in all Bluetooth tracing systems “a powerful antenna can trigger false alerts,” adversaries could track users, and more.
The thing is, in order for contact tracing apps to work, they must be universally adopted by everyone. It would help enormously if makers of these apps addressed the concerns and risks in DP-3T Project’s paper. Because contact tracing apps are working in some places, but not others, and it all comes down to voluntary adoption.
Everyone’s doing it… differently
NurPhoto via Getty Images
Contact-tracing smartphone apps are already in use by countries including China, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Israel, Italy, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan — all with varying results. Australia and the UK’s NHS plan to, and so do EU member states, which is why the European Commission (EC) just published guidelines for EU app devs.
The US is also interested; different states are pursuing their own solutions, with around 20 different state and local governments interested in using MIT’s open source “Privacy by Design” Private Kit. New York announced his week it will launch its own tri-state virus tracing program (with a huge cash infusion from Michael Bloomberg).
Then there’s Google and Apple’s unholy alliance; the companies are building APIs -— the actual contact tracing phone apps will come from public health orgs. The tech giants are calling it “Privacy-Preserving Contact Tracing,” and they already hit a few snags with the UK’s NHS.
“Apple and Google are encouraging health services worldwide to build contact-tracing apps that operate in a decentralised way, allowing individuals to know when they’ve been in contact with an infected person but preventing governments from using that data to build a picture of population movements in aggregate,” reported press.
“But the policies, unveiled last week, apply only to apps that don’t result in the creation of a centralised database of contacts,” Guardian explained. “That means that if the NHS goes ahead with its original plans, its app would face severe limitations on its operation.”
Meanwhile the US federal government chose Peter Thiel and Palantir to create the HHS Protect Now “single source” COVID-19 data tracking platform. Protect Now integrates 187 Palantir data sources, which according to press includes “hospital capacity and inventories, supply chain data from the government and industry, diagnostic and geographic testing data.” A government spokesperson told Daily Beast HHS was also relying on “private sector partner contributions of data.” Yeah, because seamless data sharing between government and private companies always ends well.
“Palantir has already done work for the Trump administration, providing profiling tools to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement as part of the president’s draconian border crackdown,” Vanity Fair reminds us. “And then there’s Thiel’s personal links to Trump. An early Facebook investor and board member, Thiel joined Trump and CEO Mark Zuckerberg for a private dinner last year at the White House and he reportedly influenced the social media giant’s policy on political ads.”
The point is, it’s convenient for companies to argue that all the Hoovering of our data they’ve done over the past 10-15 years could make them uniquely positioned to ride in on a big, white syphilitic unicorn and save us. (We’d just need to surrender to a deeper surveillance state while a seamless data sharing deal is made between the private sector and the government.)
Except it won’t save us, at least according to a white paper from the ACLU Turns out, COVID-19 is a very unique situation.
“We have spoken with engineers and executives at a number of the largest US companies that hold location data on Americans’ movements and locations and generally they have told us that their data is not suitable for determining who was in contact with whom for purposes of Covid-19,” ACLU concluded in its April 8 paper, The Limits of Location Tracking in an Epidemic.
Implementation vs. adoption
But wait: let’s back up to the part where I mentioned all the different countries around the world that are already using contact tracing apps with varying degrees of success. On the one hand we’ve got China and Israel going full police state with invasive citizen surveillance, while countries like South Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan have balanced privacy and virus tracing.
“Top of mind has been whether authoritarian regimes have an edge over democracies, because they can mandate top-down measures like lockdowns and digital tracking of infected people’s movements and contacts,” wrote Harvard Business Review. But “the top and bottom performers in Covid-19 containment span the spectrum from autocratic to democratic. It’s true that China is effectively flattening the curve, but so is South Korea, a vibrant democracy. Other democracies — the U.S., Spain, Italy, and France, are faring less well.”
It’s no coincidence that the locations seeing success with contact tracing smartphone apps have at least two things in common: governments behind the apps are tech-savvy, and the places they’re working are those with more collectivist societies — specifically, those in East Asia. Most of those tech-savvy governments emphasize controls on digital privacy (like South Korea and Singapore), easing issues of trust that might create avoidance.
In the US, states have been fractured by the federal government and the union is splintering. States are forming coalitions and fighting the federal government for citizens’ survival. A contact tracing app from the federal government will never gain universal adoption for more reasons than can be listed here.
Alexander Drago / Reuters
That’s okay, they’d just screw it up anyway.
Digital contact tracing for COVID-19 is inevitable. Because this means mass installation of a surveillance app on everyone’s phones in order for it to work, it’s a moment when we can decide that fighting for survival means fighting for our future, too.
I hate this moment in so many ways, and for so many reasons. I hate that this should be the moment that all our privacy and security mistakes with apps, companies, and people’s lives are just staring us in the face, screaming for someone to pay attention. Because this should be the promise of all this stupid technology, that when we are dying and oppressed, that we could use it to find a way and toss everyone who abused apps and tech to harm us.
There should be a contact tracing app that I want to use, and that I can trust. Not another grubby shitshow of vulnerabilities and privacy violations made by people I hate and corporations trying to make sure I have no choice.
That contact tracing app would do exactly what it needs to do, and no more -- just as described in The Privacy and Security Risk Evaluation of Digital Proximity Tracing Systems. And we’d use it as part of the things we incorporate to get through the next part of this game’s nightmare level, another tool for our arsenal of resilience, an acceptable accessory while we shift our perspective from preoccupation with fear and loss to focus on strength and resetting our worlds.
It would not sell us out, but instead help us survive and adapt -- both COVID-19 and the murderous, anti-science, profiteers and grifters trying to deep-six our freedoms and futures. Turns out survival and adaptability are evolutionary traits -- science! A definite advantage when your country’s idiot CEO is literally talking about blowing sunshine up your ass to cure the plague.
Reinforcing Reference Skills
Activities that go beyond the encyclopedia
Benjamin
1986
A librarian pal of mine found this gem in the supposed “professional collection” as she cleaned out a cubicle for a new employee. Obviously no one had touched this in years, given the amount of dust and grime present. This one was catalogued and sat around for decades, unused.
Let me go back and harp on using a shelf list. Your system should allow you to dump your catalog into some kind of report. Do not run the shelf list for the entire library. Pick collections carefully. Even the largest libraries can break out collections into small chunks. Reorganize your list of books by date (oldest to newest) and take a look. Even this one small activity can yield some surprising results. (By the way, if you do this, please send us some pictures of any of your ridiculous finds.)
“According to public filings, corporations including Ruth Chris’s Steak House, Potbelly, and Shake Shack have obtained millions in loans from the Paycheck Protection Program, a new effort intended to help small businesses that are struggling to weather the economic fallout from the coronavirus pandemic.” – Vox, 4/22/20
- - -
Greetings, fairly successful Americans —
Congratulations to you and your families for owning a corner market, hardware store, small contracting company, or whatever little butt-nug of a small business people like you own because you lack the sack it takes to become insanely wealthy. I, on the other hand, am not a communist misfit, respect my nation, and have been driven since age seven to own a multi-billion dollar retail business in any sector that would make me wealthy enough to hunt humans from a helicopter on some fucked up luxury preserve if I so desired. The point is:
I’m gonna need to cut in line ahead of you here and take a big fat chunk of that small business loan dough with a sweet little side of Paycheck Protection Plan. Ask any nature show on TV, and some man with a brainy foreign voice will tell you, verbatim: The biggest bear’s gotta eat, my bitches.
You see, while you were busy cutting off your balls and whatever the lady version of gumption privates is, and Fed-Exing them to a socialist poetry website’s GoFundMe or non-music radio station’s pledge drive, I was gearing up to be a well-capitalized king of home electronics and appliances to the tune of 1,529 full-size superstore locations and over 400 plaza, center, and mall kiosks.
So listen up, my little mom and pop shop ownin’, nutless spouse-huggin’ pud nuddlers: Shit’s gone wrong, and The King of Retail is gonna need to get at your SBA small business fixin’s.
I hope by now I’ve grabbed your attention, and please know that my thoughts and prayers are with my nation in this time of need, but guess what else I’m gonna need to grab, my little forty to ninety thousandaires? Yup, the forgivable advance on dem sweet SBA nuts all of you were hoping to get up on.
Cheer up, when I get my ten to forty million dollar pat on the ass and a little wink from Uncle Sam about not repaying that fat cheese slice from the fresh pie, it means I’ll be saving my personal dough from getting sucked into my concrete wage-labor bunkers across this glorious nation of mine. This means, if you can stop thinking about yourself for a minute, that my stores will be here for you when this is over and you need name brand electronics and quality home appliances at competitive prices in over fifteen hundred locations.
I’m sorry your small business has to suffer for my King-Size success, but this is America. You’re either at the primo golf course omelette bar when smooth D rips a deep meaty fart and whispers from the side of his mouth a secret alert that the money train starts rollin’ at zero dark thirty tomorrow, or you’re at home on your knees praying to a god that’s probably not listening because he doesn’t remember seeing you on TV from up in heaven.
I pray for you in this time of need, and the prayer goes like this:
American Jesus, please let these do-gooder small business twat niddlers pull their heads out and understand that the psychotic need for more at any cost will always be honored before those content with being of service and having enough. Thy will be done, on heaven, on earth, on daily bread that trespasses…
Surprise America, I don’t know the lyrics to this jam, but I do know I OWN A CHAIN OF 1,529 BIG BOX ELECTRONICS RETAILERS AND I’M GONNA NEED TO GO AHEAD AND GRAB THAT SWEET, SWEET SMALL BUSINESS LOAN MOOLAH, FUCKOS.
God bless, we’re all in this together/stay away from me.
![[moments later, checking phone] Okay, I agree my posting it was weird, but it's somehow even more unnerving that you immediately liked the post.](https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/coronavirus_genome_2.png "[moments later, checking phone] Okay, I agree my posting it was weird, but it's somehow even more unnerving that you immediately liked the post.")
