MASKS: Should Wearing Them Be Continued?

   From Worldometer (new  COVID-19 deaths yesterday):

        DAY   USA   WORLD   Brazil     India  South Africa

June     9    1093     4732         1185       246       82

July    22     1205     7128         1293      1120     572

Aug    12     1504     6556        1242        835     130

Sept     9     1208      6222       1136       1168       82

Oct     21     1225      6849         571        703       85

Nov    25      2304    12025        620        518      118

Dec    30      3880    14748       1224       299      465

Jan     14      4142    15512       1151        189     712              

Feb      3       4005    14265       1209       107     398

          25       2414    10578        1582       119     144

Mar     2        1989    9490         1726        110     194

          31       1115   12301          3950       458      58

April   6         906    11787          4211         631     37

May    4         853   13667          3025      3786     59 

         26         607    12348         2399      3842    101 

June    1        287    10637         2346      3205      95 

         10        452     14097         2484      6138    127

         15        353       9248         2760      1470    208

         16        434       9497         2673      1411    136

         22        352       8560         2080      1129    297

         23        326       8704         2343        978    166

Summary:  About as expected.

With more and more vaccinations, there will continue to be a decline of COVID-19, and the pandemic will end.  The virus will stick around for a very long time, but a kind of herd immunity will prevail, preventing serious outbreaks.

The Science Agenda from Scientific American this month dealt with postpandemic health habits.  We can expect some social adjustments:

• Some variation of the Oriental way of greeting each other will become commonplace.  Handshakes and cheek-kissing will decline.
• Masks will not go away. 
• Those who have a respiratory illness will more and more stay at home or wear a mask so as to avoid spreading the ailment.
• Governments will need to expand sick leave so that employees can afford to remain isolated.
• The "hero" image of sick people going to work will shift to becoming a "villain."
• The problem of children being sent to school with just a cold will become a debatable controversy.  Mask wearing might be a reasonable compromise.
• While quarantining and social distancing to complement mask-wearing were why, few caught the flu and as many colds during the past year and a third:
• There were 24,000 flu deaths in the U.S. in 2019.
• ONLY 450 flu deaths this season.
• A good number of comparison is the 38,000 traffic deaths/year in the U.S.  If only there can be a solution to this problem.
• All of 2020 to the present, I have not suffered from any cold or the flu.  I suspect most of you reading this must too have been as fortunate.

From the New York Times this morning (sorry about cutting-off the right side.  Should you wish to see the entire bullet entries, click on my parallel blog.)

More globally, another story in the magazine, by Aurora Almendral, focuses on decreasing the shipping trade’s carbon footprint. Cargo vessels are among the largest machines on the planet, and shipping generates 2.9 percent of global carbon-dioxide emissions — nearly as much as the entirety of South America. Some experts believe using wind through modern sails could considerably reduce that number.  (That ship above is Oceanbird from Sweden, to become the largest wind-powered ship, with a purpose to transport 7,000 cars and trucks across oceans.) “You might wake in the morning on a mattress made from recycled CO2,” Jon Gertner writes. “You might drive your car — with parts made from smokestack CO2 — over roads made from CO2-cured concrete. And at day’s end, you might sip carbontech vodka while making dinner with food grown in a greenhouse enriched by recycled CO2.”

Other companies are developing more environmentally friendly manufacturing techniques that would repurpose carbon dioxide into building materials, fuels, plastics and even fish food.

Most geoengineering solutions to global warming develop systems to take carbon dioxide out of the air, and at high cost.  The Blue Revolution shows promise for remediating climate change and reducing the severity of hurricanes, while making an economic profit by developing consumer products:  next generation fisheries, marine biomass plantations, renewable energy, freshwater, marine biopharmaceuticals and the like.

Saul Griffith began to gain credibility after a TED talk in 2007.  Also from the NYT this morning:

In Australia, Griffith said, a kilowatt-hour of energy generated by rooftop solar panels costs about a third of what it would from a U.S. power grid. “We can make everyone’s energy future cheaper, but politics has to work with technology, which has to work with finance,” he said.

I've been harping on this point for decades.  Government incentives and regulations remain attractive for conventional energy forms like fossil fuels and nuclear.  Here is Everything You Need to Know About Fossil Fuel Subsidies.   And How Biden Can Put the U.S. on a Path to Carbon-Free Electricity.

Finally, from the NYT:

• 
  A woman from Indiana is the first Capitol rioter to be sentenced. She will serve no prison time.
• Warren Buffett resigned as a trustee of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

While the lenient sentence gives an impression that everyone will thus get off with almost no penalty, read this article which suggests that will not be the case.  The Buffet resignation on the surface appears to merely be a formality about how old he is getting, but I suspect there is a lot more that will someday surface.

A video of cute animals: 

Yesterday I posted on the miracle of you.  Here are some ordinary miracles:

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