More Alberta Woes

 Found this on the Web recently, castigating the Conservatives for how they've managed their up-to-now main resource and who they insist on blaming for how things have turned out.

"I still hear uninformed Conservatives recite the "job killing policies of the NDP" mantra. Do they not know the facts, or are they just misleading Albertans? Oil royalties made up almost 80% of Alberta's revenue in the 70s. Through 44 years of reducing oil royalties, Getty, Klein, and Stelmach gave away our revenue to Oil and Gas shareholders, and the Conservative donors. Currently royalties are only about 3% of our revenue. Low oil prices kill jobs, not NDP policy. This graph show in spite of low oil prices, how the NDP were creating (tech, and green) jobs in 2017 and 2018) and were reducing our deficit. In their first year, the UCP shed 300,000 full time jobs. The second slide shows continuing increases in O&G production, and steadily declining royalty revenues for Albertans. Conservatives have mismanaged the O&G file. Know the facts:"

Into the Pandemic - Refuting the Finger Pointing

One persistent theme during this pandemic is how the virus SARS-CoV-2 must have been manufactured in a Wuhan lab and released into the world.

Late in March, there was an article in Live Science.

The coronavirus was not engineered in a lab. Here's how we know.

It explains, in simple terms, why researchers believe that the virus quite simply moved from animals to humans, without human meddling along the way.  It also links to a Nature Medicine article where this research was reported.

The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2

So, that should be the end of the matter, for now.  Don't count on it, though.

Other myths persist.  One rather silly one is that all our hand washing will harm our immune systems.

No, All This COVID-19 Hand Washing Isn't Going to 'Weaken' Your Immune System

We can also affirm that Trump didn't create the virus either.  However....

Masks - More Information for the Wearer

 This post isn't intended to join the interminable debate about whether masks are effective or not.  So far I'm concerned, that argument has been made, demonstrated, proved and doesn't need to be covered any more.  It joins the following list as one more thing we can do to to slow the spread of this virus.  So, wash your hands, keep your distance from other people, wear a mask when you can't keep your distance and remember that being outside is safer than being inside, especially when there are other people around.

No, this post is about a possible benefit that masks might provide to the wearer.  Up to this point, the general principle has been that masks reduce the spread of your water droplets (which could carry viral hitchhikers) as you talk, breathe and cough.

This study suggests that a mask could provide some direct benefit to the mask wearer by reducing the number of viruses the wearer might pick up.  The study calls this "reducing the inoculum" and suggests that this might result in more mild of asymptomatic cases of the disease.

Masks Do More Than Protect Others During COVID-19: Reducing the Inoculum of SARS-CoV-2 to Protect the Wearer

It remains to be seen whether this study is replicated and its findings supported, but it is interesting and worth knowing about.

Reading During the Time of COVID

The Great Influenza by John M. Barry

 I have to say that my reading during the past few months has followed a certain theme.

So this most recent read shouldn't be a surprise.  What did surprise me, almost continually as I read this book, is how much the current COVID pandemic parallels a pandemic that raged around the world just over 100 years ago.

It's about the flu pandemic of 1917-18 (although it lasted several years after 1918), and although I understood that it was about that particular flu pandemic, most of time I had this feeling that the book was really about our current global outbreak of SARS-CoV-2 that causes COVID-19. Far too many times I found myself thinking that not much has changed, everything from a lack of preparedness, denial of what was happening, refusal to take simple public health precautions, lack of leadership, and so on....

A brief review quoted from GoodReads:

"At the height of WWI, history’s most lethal influenza virus erupted in an army camp in Kansas, moved east with American troops, then exploded, killing as many as 100 million people worldwide. It killed more people in twenty-four months than AIDS killed in twenty-four years, more in a year than the Black Death killed in a century. But this was not the Middle Ages, and 1918 marked the first collision of science and epidemic disease. Magisterial in its breadth of perspective and depth of research and now revised to reflect the growing danger of the avian flu, The Great Influenza is ultimately a tale of triumph amid tragedy, which provides us with a precise and sobering model as we confront the epidemics looming on our own horizon. John M. Barry has written a new afterword for this edition that brings us up to speed on the terrible threat of the avian flu and suggest ways in which we might head off another flu pandemic."

If you want to learn more about viruses, the modernization of the American medical system (including the formation of Johns Hopkins), and how this particular virus operated, this is a must read.

Highly recommended.