Pascal Campion: A Little Longer. Some people's first impression is that this is the Titanic going down. That's a sadly symbolic response.
*
“AND I WAS ALIVE”
And I was alive in the blizzard of the blossoming pear,
Myself I stood in the storm of the bird-cherry tree.
It was all leaflife and starshower, unerring, self-shattering power,
And it was all aimed at me.
What is this dire delight flowering fleeing always earth?
What is being? What is truth?
Blossoms rupture and rapture the air,
All hover and hammer,
Time intensified and time intolerable, sweetness raveling rot.
It is now. It is not.
~ Osip Mandelstam, 4 May 1937 (most likely his last poem); translated by Christian Wiman
What great and only somewhat oxymoronic imagery: the blizzard of the blossoming pear, the storm of the bird-cherry tree — the rapture and rapture.
Mary: THE DOUBLENESS OF TRUTH
The opening poem is breathtakingly beautiful, the movement of the lines and the storm of images reproducing the speaker's overwhelming transport. For me the living heart of the truth discovered in this rapture is exactly that doubleness, the unity of rapture/rupture, beauty/terror, dire delight, hover/hammer, the "self shattering power" of "sweetness traveling rot" that is now and is not at the same time. It is a revelation, reveling in the dark heart that makes the light, the death that makes life precious, sweet, and beautiful. In the same way artificial flowers cannot approach the beauty and significance of real flowers, whose very essence is their temporality…their fleeting, intoxicating storm of blossom, that seems aimed right at us, for us, an overwhelming glory containing its own inevitable rot, death like the communion resting on every human tongue.
*
CAMUS AND THE IDEA OF DECENCY IN “THE PLAGUE”
~ “It may seem a ridiculous idea, but the only way to fight the plague is with decency.” Joining the “health teams” was not in itself an act of great significance—rather, “not doing it would have been incredible at the time.” This point is made over and over again in the novel, as though Camus were worried lest it be missed: “When you see the suffering it brings,” Rieux remarks at one point, “you have to be mad, blind or a coward to resign yourself to the plague.”
Camus’s insistence on placing individual moral responsibility at the heart of all public choices cuts sharply across the comfortable habits of our own age. His definition of heroism—ordinary people doing extraordinary things out of simple decency—rings truer than we might once have acknowledged. His depiction of instant ex cathedra judgments—“My brethren, you have deserved it”—will be grimly familiar to us all.
Rambert, the young journalist cut off from his wife in Paris, is initially desperate to escape the quarantined city. His obsession with his personal suffering makes him indifferent to the larger tragedy, from which he feels quite detached—he is not, after all, a citizen of Oran, but was caught there by the vagaries of chance. It is on the very eve of his getaway that he realizes how, despite himself, he has become part of the community and shares its fate; ignoring the risk and in the face of his earlier, selfish needs, he remains in Oran and joins the “health teams.” From a purely private resistance against misfortune he has graduated to the solidarity of a collective resistance against the common scourge.
In Camus’s view it was inertia, or ignorance, which accounted for people’s failure to act. Most people are better than you think—as Tarrou puts it, “You just need to give them the opportunity.”
The charge that Camus was too ambiguous in his judgments, too unpolitical in his metaphors, illuminates not his weaknesses but his strengths. This is something that we are perhaps better placed to understand now than were The Plague’s first readers. Thanks to Primo Levi and Václav Havel we have become familiar with the “gray zone.” We understand better that in conditions of extremity there are rarely to be found comfortingly simple categories of good and evil, guilty and innocent. We know more about the choices and compromises faced by men and women in hard times, and we are no longer so quick to judge those who accommodate themselves to impossible situations. Men may do the right thing from a mixture of motives and may with equal ease do terrible deeds with the best of intentions—or no intentions at all.
Camus was a moralist who unhesitatingly distinguished good from evil but abstained from condemning human frailty. He was a student of the “absurd” who refused to give in to necessity.7 He was a public man of action who insisted that all truly important questions came down to individual acts of kindness and goodness. And, like Tarrou, he was a believer in absolute truthswho accepted the limits of the possible: “Other men will make history…. All I can say is that on this earth there are pestilences and there are victims—and as far as possible one must refuse to be on the side of the pestilence.” ~
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2001/11/29/on-the-plague/?fbclid=IwAR2o27zmQh_lIK6QQ5gFHhTZ9LZGIHlYn0jVOpdbY-gelNWQquJ4jP1VaEw
Oriana:
The article is quite long, but I hope that this brief excerpt represents the main idea of choosing to do the decent thing, working for the collective good. I read the novel a very long time ago, but one of the things I remember was the journalist who tried to escape from the quarantined city — and his moral awakening.
“Most people are better than you think. You just need to give them the opportunity.” I believe that. At the same time, I am aware that people can become worse than we think — when led by a fascist demagogue, for instance.
I also remember the aspiring writer, Joseph Grand, who was forever perfecting the first sentence of his novel, and couldn't get past it. It's a much needed comic relief. In the end, everyone comes to love the hapless would-be writer.
*
“I have sought only reasons to transcend our darkest nihilism. Not, I would add, through virtue, nor because of some rare elevation of spirit, but from an instinctive fidelity to the light in which I was born, and in which for thousands of years, [people] have learned to welcome life even in suffering.” ~ Albert Camus
Oriana:
As an acquaintance said to me, “There is an elementary pleasure in existing.”
“An instinctive fidelity to the light in which I was born” — wonderful phrasing
"He reminds us that suffering is random, and that is the kindest thing one can say about it." ~ Alain de Botton writing on Albert Camus
*
A COVID NURSE RECOUNTS WHAT HAPPENS ON ICU
~ I am a Covid ICU nurse in New York City, and yesterday, like many other days lately, I couldn’t fix my patient. Sure, that happens all the time in the ICU. It definitely wasn’t the first time. It certainly won’t be the last. What makes this patient noteworthy? A few things, actually. He was infected with Covid 19, and he will lose his battle with Covid 19. He is only 23 years old.
I was destroyed by his clinical course in a way that has only happened a few times in my nursing career. It wasn’t his presentation. I’ve seen that before. It wasn’t his complications. I’ve seen that too.
It was the grief. It was his parents. The grief I witnessed yesterday, was grief that I haven’t allowed myself to recognize since this runaway train got rolling here in early March. I could sense it. It was lingering in the periphery of my mind, but yesterday something in me gave way, and that grief rushed in.
(. . . ) There’s been a significant change in how we approach the critically ill covid-infected patients on a number of different levels over the last two months. We’re learning about the virus. We’re following trends and patterns. We are researching as we are treating.
The reality is, the people who get sick later in this pandemic will have a better chance for survival. Yet, every day working feels like Groundhog Day. All of the patients have developed the same issues. This 23-year-old kid walked around for a week silently hypoxic and silently dying. By the time he got to us, it was already far too late.
First pneumonia, then Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ARDS), essentially lung failure. Then kidney failure from global hypoxia and the medications we were giving in the beginning, desperately trying to find something that works. Then learning that it doesn’t work, it’s doing more harm than good in the critical care Covid population.
Dialysis for the kidneys. They are so sick that your normal three-times weekly dialysis schedule is too harsh on their body. They’re too unstable. So, we, the ICU nurses, run the dialysis slowly and continuously.
They are all obstructing their bowels from the ever-changing array of medications, as we ran out of some medications completely during our surge. We had to substitute alternatives, narcotics, sedatives, and paralytics, medications we’re heavily sedating and treating their pain with, in an effort to help them tolerate barbaric ventilator settings.
Barbaric ventilator settings while lying them on their bellies because their lungs are so damaged that we have to flip them onto their bellies in an effort to perfuse the functioning lung tissue and ventilate the damaged lung tissue.
Lungs that are perfused with blood that doesn’t even have adequate oxygen carrying capacity because of how this virus attacks.
Blood that clots. And bleeds. And clots. And bleeds. Everything in their bodies is deranged. Treat the clots with continuous anticoagulation. Stop the anticoagulation when they bleed.
GI bleeds, brain bleeds, pulmonary emboli, strokes. The brain bleeds will likely die. The GI bleeds get blood transfusions and interventions.
Restart the anticoagulation when they clot their continuous or intermittent dialysis filters, rendering them unusable, because we’re trying not to let them die slowly from renal failure. We are constantly making impossible treatment decisions in the critical care pandemic population.
A lot of people have asked me what it’s like here. I truly don’t have adequate descriptors in my vocabulary, try as I might, so I’ll defer to the metaphor of fire.
We are attempting to put out one fire, while three more are cropping up. Then we find out a week or two later that we unknowingly threw gasoline on one fire, because there’s still so much we don’t know about this virus.
Then suddenly there’s no water to fight the fire with. We’re running around holding ice cubes in an effort to put out an inferno. Oh yeah, and the entire time you’ve been in this burning building, you barely have what you need to protect yourself.
The protection you’re using, the guidelines governing that protection, evolved with the surge. One-time use N95? That’s the prior standard, and after what we’ve been through, that’s honestly hysterical. As we were surging here, the CDC revised their guidelines, because the PPE shortage was so critical.
Use anything, they said. Use whatever you have for as long as you can, and improvise what you don’t have.
All of our choices to intervene in this situation risk our own health and safety. In the beginning we were more cautious with ourselves. We don’t want to get sick. We don’t want to be a patient in our own ICU. We’ve cared for our own staff in our ICUs. We don’t want to die. Now? I’ve already been sick. I am so, so tired of the constant death that is the ICU, that personally, I will do anything as long as I have my weeks old N95 and face shield on, just to keep someone alive.
The heartbreakingly unique part of this pandemic, is that these patients are so alone. We are here, but they are suffering alone, with no familiar face or voice. They are dying alone, surrounded by strangers crying into their own masks, trying not to let our precious N95 get wet, trying not to touch our faces with contaminated hands.
Their families are home, waiting for the phone call with their daily update. Some of their loved ones are also sick and quarantined at home.
Can you even IMAGINE? Your husband or wife, mother or father. Sibling. Your child. You drop your loved one off at the emergency department entrance, and you never, ever see them alive again.
That level of grief is absolutely astounding to me, and that’s coming from a person who knows grief. I was there at the bedside, I held my young husband’s hand when I watched his heart stop beating. I was there. That grief changes you immeasurably.
But this grief? This pandemic grief? It’s inconceivable. These families will suffer horribly, every day for the rest of their lives. They might not even be able to bury their loved one. God, if they can’t afford a funeral with an economic shut-down, their loved one will be buried in a mass grave on Hart Island with thousands of others like them. What grave will they have to visit on birthdays and holidays?
Now that I’ve had the time to reflect and write, now that I’ve let the walls down in my mind to let the grief flood in, now that I’ve seen this grief for what feels like the thousandth time since the first week of March as a nurse in a Covid ICU in New York City, it’s time you heard our side. This is devastating. This is our reality. This is our grief. ~ Julianne Nicole, April 24, 2020, 9:49 PM
(an abbreviated account — full text can be found at https://www.facebook.com/danusha.goska. Look for the heading Julianne Nicole)
Oriana:
The heroism of the health workers is almost unimaginable.
But I want to comment on something else, something which was already discussed in my previous blog on the extremely high mortality of patients put on a ventilator, and how the silent hypoxia can be detected at an early stage, treatable without a ventilator. What it takes is self-monitoring with a pulse-oximeter, an inexpensive device available OTC at pharmacies and online. I got mine at Walmart.
I know it sounds too good to be true. And yes, there are some people so riddled with underlying chronic illnesses that a covid infection is a death sentence no matter how early the detection and treatment. But especially when it comes to younger patients, lives could be saved.
Many years ago, an MD said to me, “Most people die of ignorance.” I think this is particularly true when it comes to the coronavirus and the silent hypoxia is can cause. Yet a dip in blood oxygen level is almost astonishingly easy to detect.
True, at this point it’s a rare person who has her own pulse-oximeter. When I was in the hospital last September, at least half and nurses and nurses’ aides had their own drugstore-bought oximeter and used it in preference to the hospital-provided one, which kept slipping off. Yet it requires no special training to use the drugstore-type oximeter. What you most need to know is that your hands should be warm. After you make sure your hands are warm, you just stick your finger into the small gadget and press a tiny button. The reading is ready in seconds.
The lowest reading that’s still in the normal range is 94%. If you start coughing, are running a fever, and your blood oxygen starts to drop (especially if it dips under 90%), don’t wait — get medical help. Early treatment means that most likely you won’t need a ventilator. For those over 65, this is extremely important.
If you wait until your lips turn blue and you need to be intubated, it’s the end.
Mary: DEATHS BY SUFFOCATION, VENTILATORS ON BARBARIC SETTINGS
This pandemic will leave many things behind, many changes in our ordinary lives, in norms of behavior, in assumptions about safety and risk, in the way we approach leisure and travel..the state of politics...almost every part of our lives will be affected. But what the nurse's statement demonstrates is that perhaps above all else, covid will leave us with an enormous burden of grief. We may not all experience anything like her experience at the heart of this catastrophe, but none will be untouched. We have seen bodies in plastic bags stacked like cordwood in refrigerated trucks, or even rented unrefrigerated trucks with workers standing on those already loaded to pull the next ones in. We can't have funerals for those lost, we can't gather in groups to mourn.
As she points out, a terrible loneliness has been imposed. Not only the loneliness of social distancing, but the loneliness of those thousands dying alone unable to be with loved ones, robbed of the simple comforts of voice and touch. How terrible to take a loved one to the ER where you will be separated, and that loved one goes on to suffer and die without you.
This is only compounded by the fact we all know these are painful, nightmarish deaths, deaths by suffocation, accompanied by the panic of not being able to breathe, and the desperate intervention of intubation and ventilators on barbaric settings, destroying the organs they are trying to relieve. Robbed of speech and consciousness by the tubes and the heavy sedation needed to keep them from struggling to get it out, these people are suffering horrible deaths. They are victims of our ignorance in the face of this pathogen, whose attack is so complex, and on so many fronts we are just starting to see how it works , and how we may, not cure it, but slow it down, lower its strength, give its victims a fighting chance.
Knowing all these things will most likely only add to our grief, even though we are learning every day more about how covid works, how to direct our treatments — as, for instance, avoiding mechanical ventilation as a very last ditch option, using prone positioning to assist oxygenation, discovering how this disease deranges clotting and increases risks of both bleeds and embolisms...these things will show us what to watch for, as well as possible intervention.
Amped-up research is giving us some real indications of drugs that may, not cure, but moderate the disease, maybe enough to allow recovery. I agree, we will solve this, but not before enormous losses. And recovering from those losses mentally and emotionally will be neither quick nor easy.
Oriana:
Speaking of nightmarish deaths — has anyone thought that in some cases at least, when death is certain, the hospice approach might be best? Relieve the pain, but don’t use “ventilators on barbaric settings.”
Above all, we need to understand that the use of ventilators can be prevented if hypoxia is detected early — that’s where the oximeter comes in.
Let me once again post the chart of ventilator deaths. Please note especially the percentage of deaths for those over 65.
Let’s detox ourselves with a bit of black humor:
Oriana:
PS: Scientists are speculating that coronavirus will become milder, seasonal flu.
*
OLD DRUGS MAY PROVE EFFECTIVE AGAINST THE CORONAVIRUS
~ In the early 1950s, psychiatrists began treating schizophrenia with a new drug called chlorpromazine. Seven decades later, the drug is still used as an anti-psychotic.
But now scientists have discovered that the drug, also known as Thorazine, can do something entirely different. It can stop the new coronavirus that causes Covid-19 from invading cells.
Driven by the pandemic’s spread, research teams have been screening thousands of drugs to see if they have this unexpected potential to fight the coronavirus. They’ve tested the drugs on dishes of cells, and a few dozen candidates have made the first cut.
“I’m going to be brutally honest with you: 95 to 98 percent of these are going to fail,” said Sumit K. Chanda, a virologist at Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute in La Jolla, Calif. “But we only need one or two.”
The strategy Dr. Chanda and other researchers are using is known as drug repurposing. It has a history that started decades before Covid-19 appeared. In 1987, for example, the cancer drug zidovudine became the first F.D.A.-approved drug against H.I.V.
The most obvious drugs to repurpose against the new coronavirus are those that work against other viruses. One high-profile antiviral being investigated is remdesivir, which Gilead Sciences previously tested — unsuccessfully — as an antiviral against Ebola.
On Wednesday, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the federal government’s leading infectious diseases scientist, announced that a clinical trial showed that remdesivir may reduce the mortality rate of Covid-19 and can shorten the duration of the illness.
But over the years, researchers have found some drugs that originally had nothing to do with viruses turn out to be good antivirals, too. It’s just hard to tell in advance which ones have this hidden power.
“We don’t know a lot about why drugs do what they do,” said Matthew Frieman, a virologist at the University of Maryland School of Medicine.
In 2012, another coronavirus disease known as MERS emerged in the Middle East. Dr. Frieman responded by starting a drug-repurposing study. He and his colleagues tested 290 F.D.A.-approved drugs and found that 27 of them blocked the MERS virus from infecting cells. They also proved effective against the related coronavirus that causes SARS.
Dr. Frieman and his colleagues have now tested those drugs against the new coronavirus, and made a preliminary report that 17 of them showed promise. Along with chlorpromazine, they include drugs for disorders as varied as Parkinson’s disease and leukemia.
Recently, Dr. Chanda’s team in California began a mammoth search of their own for drugs to repurpose for Covid-19. They doused infected cells with 13,000 compounds and looked for ones that slowed down the virus. They then narrowed down these candidates by reducing their doses, in order to mimic the levels that would end up in a patient’s lungs.
On April 17, Dr. Chanda’s team reported in a preprint, which has not yet been peer-reviewed by a journal, that six drugs showed particular promise, including one for osteoporosis and one that’s been investigated as treatment for arthritis.
Two intriguing protein targets
Yet another team has been trying to find drugs that work against coronavirus — and also to learn why they work.
The team, led by Nevan Krogan at the University of California, San Francisco, has focused on how the new coronavirus takes over our cells at the molecular level.
The researchers determined that the virus manipulates our cells by locking onto at least 332 of our own proteins. By manipulating those proteins, the virus gets our cells to make new viruses.
Dr. Krogan’s team found 69 drugs that target the same proteins in our cells the virus does. They published the list in a preprint last month, suggesting that some might prove effective against Covid-19.
It turned out that most of the 69 candidates did fail. But both in Paris and New York, the researchers found that nine drugs drove the virus down.
“The things we’re finding are 10 to a hundred times more potent than remdesivir,” Dr. Krogan said. He and his colleagues published their findings Thursday in the journal Nature.
Strikingly, the drugs hit only two targets.
One group temporarily stops the creation of new proteins inside cells. This group includes molecules that are being tested as cancer drugs, such as ternatin-4 and Zotatifin.
Dr. Shoichet speculated that these compounds starve the virus of the proteins it needs to make new copies of itself. This attack may suddenly halt the viral production line.
“Viruses are actually delicate beasts,” he said.
The other compounds home in on a pair of proteins known as Sigma-1 and Sigma-2 receptors. These receptors are part of the cell’s communication network, helping the cell withstand stress in its environment.
Why does the new coronavirus need to manipulate Sigma receptors? “We don’t really know,” Dr. Shoichet said.
One possibility is that the virus uses Sigma receptors to make a cell produce more of the oily molecules that form membranes for new viruses.
Among the substances that act on Sigma receptors and block the virus, the researchers found, are the hormone progesterone and the drugs clemastine and cloperastine, both used against allergies.
In addition, Dr. Krogan said that all of Dr. Frieman’s candidates, including chlorpromazine, target Sigma receptors. A third of Dr. Chanda’s candidates do too, he said.
The researchers also tested dextromethorphan, a Sigma-receptor-targeting drug in many brands of cough syrup. They were surprised to find that, at least in their cell samples, it actually made infections of this coronavirus worse.
In their paper, the researchers raised the possibility that Covid-19 patients may want to avoid dextromethorphan. Dr. Krogan emphasized that more study would be needed to see if it actually increases coronavirus infection in humans. “But if it was me,” he said, to be cautious, “I would not be taking these cough syrups.”
About those malaria drugs
The anti-malaria drugs chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine act on the Sigma receptor. Dr. Krogan’s team found that they also fought the virus in cells. Those compounds were extolled by President Trump for weeks despite no firm evidence they actually helped cure Covid-19.
Dr. Frieman and Dr. Chanda also found that chloroquine-related drugs worked fairly well in slowing the virus in cell cultures. But Dr. Chanda found they didn’t work as well as the six compounds at the top of his list.
Dr. Chanda expressed skepticism about the chloroquine drugs, noting their failure against other viruses.
“We’ve been down this road multiple times,” he said. “I would happy to be wrong about this.”
Last week, the F.D.A. issued a warning against using hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine for Covid-19 outside the hospital setting or a clinical trial. That’s because the drug has a well-known risk for causing irregular heart rhythms.
In their new study, Dr. Krogan and his colleagues ran an experiment that might explain this risk at the molecular level.
They found that chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine bind not just to Sigma receptors, but to a heart protein called hERG, which helps control heartbeats.
Dr. Krogan and his colleagues found that other compounds target Sigma proteins in a more promising way.
An experimental anticancer compound called PB28 is 20 times more potent than hydroxychloroquine against the coronavirus, for example. But it’s far less likely to grab onto the hERG protein.
Dr. Chanda said that PB28 in particular “looks really fantastic.”
Dr. Krogan said that studies are underway to test the drug in hamsters to see if that promise holds. Dr. Frieman and his colleagues are starting animal studies of their own, as well as testing drugs on a chip lined with human lung cells.
Timothy Sheahan, a virologist at the University of North Carolina who was not involved in the new studies cautioned that it will take more testing to make sure these promising drugs are safe to give to patients ravaged by Covid-19.
Cancer drugs, for example, can be “like a sledgehammer to your body,” he noted. “Are you going to want to do that when someone is really sick?”
In addition to animal tests and clinical trials, researchers are now planning to tweak the structure of these drugs to see if they can work even more effectively against the virus.
“Now we go crazy trying to make them more potent,” Dr. Krogan said. ~
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/30/health/coronavirus-antiviral-drugs.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage
from another source:
~ Scientists tested a battery of drugs to see if any could interrupt those interactions and limit the virus’s growth. Drugs that have shown some promise in lab experiments involving monkey cells include antipsychotics haloperidol and cloperazine; an anxiety and depression drug called siramesine; antihistamines clemastine and cloperastine; and an experimental drug called zotatifin, now in clinical trials testing its efficacy against cancer.
None has been tried against COVID-19 in people.
The team also found an experimental compound, PB28, that performed better than hydroxychloroquine at inhibiting the virus’s growth by interfering with certain protein interactions. Unlike hydroxychloroquine, PB28 doesn’t mess with heart rhythm proteins, so may have fewer side effects (SN: 4/21/20). PB28 also hasn’t been tested in people.
The hormone progesterone also interfered with the virus’s replication. ~
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/covid-19-coronavirus-cough-syrup-medicine-ingredient-virus-worse
Oriana:
I'm particularly interested in progesterone (it need not be given by injection — compounding pharmacies produce effective creams and sublingual tablets). And the warning against dextromethorphan-containing cough syrup may be in order.
And the finding that PB28 is twenty times more effective than hydroxychloroquine, without the risk of adverse cardiac effects, is certainly worth attention.
I continue to be interested in the possible use of the old TB vaccine, and maybe also the polio vaccine. Their safety is already established and clinical trials could proceed.
MORE ABOUT PROGESTERONE
Searching for more information on progesterone, I found this 2016 study:
~ For their research, Klein and her colleagues placed progesterone implants in female mice and left other mice, also female, without. The mice were then infected with influenza A virus. Both sets of mice became ill, but those which had the progesterone implants had less pulmonary inflammation, better lung function and saw the damage to their lung cells repaired more quickly.
The researchers found that progesterone was protective against the more serious effects of the flu by increasing the production of a protein called amphiregulin by the cells lining the lungs. When the researchers bred mice that were depleted of amphiregulin, the protective effects of progesterone disappeared as well. Klein says she was not surprised that progesterone lessened the inflammation and damage associated with the flu. What she didn't expect was to find that progesterone also helped induce repair. ~
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/09/160915144704.htm
REMDESIVIR SHOWS PROMISE
~ Remdesivir was originally developed as an Ebola treatment. It is an antiviral and works by attacking an enzyme that a virus needs in order to replicate inside our cells.
The trial was run by the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and 1,063 people took part. Some patients were given the drug while others received a placebo (dummy) treatment.
Dr Anthony Fauci who runs the NIAID said: "The data shows remdesivir has a clear-cut, significant, positive effect in diminishing the time to recovery."
He said the results prove "a drug can block this virus" and were "opening the door to the fact that we now have the capability of treating" patients.
The impact on deaths is not as clear cut. The mortality rate was 8% in people given remdesivir and 11.6% in those given a placebo, but this result was not statistically significant, meaning scientists cannot tell if the difference is real.
It is also not clear who is benefiting. Is it allowing people who would have recovered anyway to do so more quickly? Or is it preventing people from needing treatment in intensive care?
Did the drug work better in younger or older people? Or those with or without other diseases? Do patients have to be treated early when the virus is thought to peak in the body?
These will be important questions when the full details are eventually published, as a drug could have the twin benefit of saving lives and helping to lift lockdown.
"These data are promising, and given that we have no proven treatments yet for Covid, it may well lead to fast-track approval of remdesivir for treatment of Covid," said Prof Babak Javid, a consultant in infectious diseases at Cambridge University Hospitals.
"However, it also shows that remdesivir is not a magic bullet in this context: the overall benefit in survival was 30%."
Other drugs being investigated for Covid-19 include those for malaria and HIV which can attack the virus as well as compounds that can calm the immune system.
It is thought the anti-virals may be more effective in the early stages, and the immune drugs later in the disease. ~
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-52478783?at_custom2=facebook_page&at_custom3=BBC+News&at_medium=custom7&at_custom1=%5Bpost+type%5D&at_campaign=64&at_custom4=3A416A84-8A51-11EA-8984-019C96E8478F&fbclid=IwAR0bGCHedKz9h62lMWKjo9QYjY7YKM7c7pdKZ_XsRZ2Zb_swey5tCDNz40A
Oriana:
The FDA is planning to allow “emergency use” of remdesivir. The drug is classified as experimental, and its benefits have been described as “modest.”
Pfizer is also testing a vaccine in Germany. It will soon begin testing it in the US. We don’t have a “magic bullet,” but we are beginning to have new resources.
It turns out that among these resources are “repurposed” old drugs — and at least one of them shows the promise to be many times more effective than remdesivir.
It makes sense that the anti-virals would be more effective early in the disease, and drugs that dampen down the immune response later on. It’s one of nature’s ironies that our own immune system can overreact and kill us.
*
A GREAT NEED
Out
of a great need
we are all holding hands
and climbing.
Not loving is a letting go.
Listen,
the terrain around here
is
far too
dangerous
for
that.
~ Hafiz
“I do not believe that things will turn out well, but the idea that they might is of decisive importance.” ~ Max Horkheimer
Oriana:
Exactly. We must keep in mind that scientists are working on all possible angles of how to outwit the virus. It's a battle between the virus and humanity, a battle we must win and shall win.
However, covid-19 has turned out to be a very complicated pathogen. We are learning a lot. For instance, the intermediary host between the bats and humans is likely not a pangolin, but a raccoon dog (related not to raccoons, but to foxes).
*
HOW PEOPLE LEARN RESILIENCE OR NON-RESILIENCE
~ “[Martin Seligman], who pioneered much of the field of positive psychology, found that training people to change their explanatory styles from internal to external (“Bad events aren’t my fault”), from global to specific (“This is one narrow thing rather than a massive indication that something is wrong with my life”), and from permanent to impermanent (“I can change the situation, rather than assuming it’s fixed”) made them more psychologically successful and less prone to depression.
The same goes for locus of control: not only is a more internal locus (“I can change this”) tied to perceiving less stress and performing better but changing your locus from external to internal leads to positive changes in both psychological well-being and objective work performance. The cognitive skills that underpin resilience, then, seem like they can indeed be learned over time, creating resilience where there was none.
Unfortunately, the opposite may also be true. “We can become less resilient, or less likely to be resilient,” Bonanno says. “We can create or exaggerate stressors very easily in our own minds. That’s the danger of the human condition.” Human beings are capable of worry and rumination: we can take a minor thing, blow it up in our heads, run through it over and over, and drive ourselves crazy until we feel like that minor thing is the biggest thing that ever happened.
Resilience is, ultimately, a set of skills that can be learned.” ~
Mary: RESILIENCE IS A HABIT OF THOUGHT
I believe resilience is not only a set of skills that can be learned, but a habit of thought that can be used to replace habits of thought that are unreasonable, unhealthy and self deceiving . Habits of self-blame, of globalizing despair and helplessness to change can be challenged, refuted and deleted. And this has to be done consciously and deliberately, so that you see and direct your own acquisition of these skills, your own progress in learning resilience. This process may start slow and small, but has a tendency to shift scope suddenly and become a new way of understanding and acting that will become your new normal.
Oriana:
After I overcame depression, a friend of mine who also happens to be a therapist told me, “You performed cognitive therapy on yourself.” Cognitive therapy recognizes that thoughts can control behavior. First of all, I had to recognized that depression is a certain kind of behavior — engaging in rumination, including constantly thinking histrionically despairing, logically faulty thoughts. (Yes, talk about being a self-centered drama queen.)
And behavior can be changed. I whole-heartedly agree that depressive, non-resilient thinking is a HABIT OF THOUGHT. Once you understand that these thoughts are false, and once you become willing to drop the habit of thinking the same garbage over and over, it’s surprisingly easy to stop. Or, to be precise, it was surprisingly easy for me. The insight was enough. The shift was sudden.
But when I think of what led to the insight, I see that I’d previously read a number of articles on cognitive errors underlying depression, for instance catastrophizing and globalizing (easy to catch because it typically includes the words always and never). Amazingly, I had to re-learn how to think accurately and realistically. I needed to admit, again and again, that practically everything is more complex than it seems.I needed to become more rational.
Talk about a lesson in humility: a so-called intellectual like myself learning how to think!
For always and never substitute sometimes. For self-labeling, substitute the insight that the self is multiple and always changing. Instead of blaming yourself, note the power of circumstances over which you had no control. Learn to say maybe rather than trap yourself in absolutes. Admit that you don't know the answer, but be open to partial answers, which are never black or white. Realize the obvious: even though I don’t see the solution now, some kind of solution exists and will occur to me later — it’s like the creative process.
This is realistic thinking rather than “positive thinking.” I’ve discovered that resilience, as a habit of accurate thought, is a fidelity to truth.
And yes, “practice makes perfect”: if you practice being strong, it becomes automatic — a habit of thought, as Mary put it. You can practice being weak, or you can practice being strong. Choose strength. Choose resilience.
*
“The twisted tree gets to live its life, while the straight tree ends up in boards.” ~ Chinese proverb
CONSTRUCTION CAUSES MAJOR POLLUTION
~ The construction industry — from the mining and smelting of raw materials to dealing with the waste from demolished structures — has a huge environmental footprint that is often overlooked. It produces 11% of global greenhouse gas emissions. That’s a staggeringly high number, four times the emissions of the whole aviation sector. Added to this, the United Nations predicts 2.3 billion more people will live in cities in 2050 than do now. Construction will have to expand rapidly to keep pace.
Modern cement — the active ingredient in concrete — is made primarily from limestone, which is heated with other raw materials in a kiln at more than 2,600 degrees Fahrenheit. Limestone is mostly calcium carbonate. The intense heat breaks apart the molecule, burning off carbon dioxide as a gas and leaving calcium oxide behind, which coalesces into gray marble-sized spheres called clinker.
The clinker is cooled and ground into a powder that hardens phenomenally well when combined with different amounts of water and an aggregate, like sand. The final product is known as concrete.
Making clinker produces the vast majority of the emissions associated with the final concrete product. In addition to the CO₂ released from the kiln, just getting the kiln that hot takes a lot of fuel. And cement companies often burn the dirtiest ad-hoc fuels to fire their kilns, like old tires. “The U.S. is big on that,” says Sabbie Miller, a materials scientist at the University of California, Davis. “We use a good amount of tire burning, as well as pet coke,” she says of the extremely high-carbon waste product from the oil refining industry.
If cement manufacturing were a country, it would have the third-highest carbon emissions in the world. It emits more pollution than all the trucks in the world. While the climate effects are astronomical, the health effects are also dangerous. In addition to carbon dioxide, cement production emits sulfur oxides and nitrogen oxides, which are precursors to ozone ― better known as smog. It also spews fine particulate matter into the air. Both ozone and particulate matter are linked to a long list of health problems, including asthma, lung cancer and developmental delays in children.
Then there is the issue of sand ― by weight, it is the biggest component of concrete. Each ton of cement is combined with 6 or 7 tons of sand or gravel; the cement is the structural “glue” that holds the sand together. Sand mining can have devastating repercussions for communities, both due to land erosion as well as from air pollution. Illegal sand mining is common, leading to unchecked environmental destruction. At least 24 small Indonesian islands had disappeared by 2010 due to sand mining.
Just as concrete dominates the outer structure of our built environment, gypsum drywall has become the default for our inner walls. Gypsum is a naturally occurring mineral composed of calcium, sulfur and oxygen, and it is incredibly abundant ― the U.S. alone has more than 55 gypsum mines. When pressed between sheaves of paper, it makes an excellent, customizable, naturally fire-resistant and incredibly cheap wall material. Since skyrocketing in popularity after World War II, gypsum drywall has become ubiquitous in U.S. homes.
But the incredible utility of drywall is not without its costs. Workers in gypsum mines and on construction sites may inhale gypsum and silica dust, which can provoke a range of respiratory diseases and can increase the risk of silicosis and lung cancer.
Unlike steel and wood, which are recycled from construction products at a high rate, almost no gypsum drywall gets recycled. When drywall gets wet or dirty, it is almost impossible to use again, and it crumbles easily, making it hard to reuse. Roughly 13 million tons of drywall is generated as waste in the U.S. per year, of which about 2% is recycled.
That means nearly all gypsum drywall winds up in landfills, where it can get wet. Wet gypsum produces hydrogen sulfide, a gas that smells like rotten eggs. Not only is it a nuisance, but the gas also poses potential health risks to communities near landfills.
Hydrogen sulfide gas is toxic at high concentrations. Some communities in Canada won’t even accept drywall at landfills due to concern over hydrogen sulfide. Hydrogen sulfide runoff, meanwhile, can contaminate water, threatening wildlife.
Construction is predicted to grow as urbanization increases across the world, especially in Southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. By 2060, the U.N. projects the international construction community will add 2.5 trillion square feet of buildings, which is equal to the world’s entire current building stock. That rate of addition is the equivalent of adding an entire New York City to the planet every 34 days for the next 40 years.
Cement production is projected to increase to over 5 billion tons over the next 30 years. Yet, to achieve the goals set out by the Paris climate agreement, annual emissions from the cement industry would have to fall by at least 16% by 2030.
SUSTAINABLE SOLUTIONS
One simple improvement would be to stop using ultra-dirty fuels to heat kilns; just replacing old tires and other low-quality fuel with conventional oil would reduce greenhouse gas emissions of concrete by 9% and could reduce the health damages associated with air pollution by 14%. So could reducing the proportion of clinker to each batch of concrete.
Using other materials as aggregate — like salvaging glass from waste streams and grinding it into a fine powder — would replace the amount of cement needed per each batch.
Substituting some clinker for other materials can be deployed cheaply and immediately, according to a report from the British policy institute Chatham House, because it doesn’t require new equipment. “It is, therefore, especially important to scale up clinker substitution in the near term while more radical options, such as the introduction of novel and carbon-negative cements, are still under development,” the report’s authors state.
Where Miller sees hope for more immediate solutions is in the design phase ― not production. Designers and structural engineers, she says, could have tremendous power to change the equation by designing buildings to use less concrete in the first place. “Engineers do have a huge amount of control over how designs are being specified. Just the smallest changes can have a huge benefit.”
Kate Simonen, an architect and structural engineer at the University of Washington, agrees.
“Don’t tear down buildings and rebuild them if you can reuse them,” she says. Although it’s often a lot less labor-intensive to demolish and rebuild, rather than to retrofit an existing building for a new use, says Simonen, there is a tremendous climate cost to using all-new building materials.
She thinks there’s a role for near-term solutions, such as making the materials that already exist more efficiently, as well as pushing ahead on the longer-range development of materials like the cyanobacteria bricks. (The microbes in the brick are cyanobacteria, which perform photosynthesis to grow, taking in carbon dioxide. They produce a powdery substance called calcium carbonate — the main ingredient in cement — which toughens the material.)
Among those techniques, “mass timber,” an approach using ultra-strong engineered wood as a replacement for reinforced concrete in buildings, probably comes up the most among architects and designers ― the potential for wooden skyscrapers is an extremely hot topic. An 18-story mass timber building went up in Vancouver, Canada, in 2016, and in Norway, an 18-story tower opened last month.
There is growing support for this in the U.S., where several projects are already in the works. At the moment, however, wood buildings in the U.S. can’t legally rise past a six stories ― Carbon12, an eight-story building in Portland, Oregon, is currently the tallest all-wood building in the country. But in 2021, building codes are set to be updated to permit high-rise wood buildings up to 18 stories.
Proponents of mass timber say that using sustainable forestry methods to grow enough wood to replace concrete in buildings could have a greater climate benefit from solely planting trees because it would lock in place the carbon inside the trees, rather than it being released, as happens when a tree dies and decomposes, or burns in a wildfire. Plus, the emission savings from using wood instead of concrete would be formidable. In other words, cities of the future could be transformed from carbon sources to carbon sinks, simply by being built with engineered timber.
But drawbacks remain: There is unlikely to be enough wood in the world to construct wood buildings on a mass scale. And it remains to be seen if forestry can truly be made sustainable enough for this to be a helpful, rather than harmful, approach. The carbon-sink argument applies only to new forests; old-growth forests that have been standing for hundreds of years are excellent long-term carbon sinks and are extremely vulnerable to being lost.
Other innovations involve using agricultural products as building materials. In certain circles, support is growing, albeit slowly, for “hempcrete,” a building material made from hemp. Hemp has been used as a traditional building material in Europe for thousands of years. The plant grows quickly, unlike wood, and uses far less fertilizer than traditional crops, such as corn. Hemp’s fibers mix readily with lime to create a strong, light concrete. It doesn’t mold, and it’s naturally pest-resistant. There are still relatively few hemp buildings in the U.S.; the first was built in California in 2010, and as of 2018 there were 50 homes made with hempcrete, according to a New York Times report. But that could soon change: The most recent farm bill in the U.S., signed into law in 2018, permitted industrial hemp farming in the country for the first time.
In Europe, commercial-grade wall panels are being made out of pressed straw and are being installed in multi-story buildings. A company in California is making rice husks into pressed-board panels; rice farming produces a lot of unusable straw that often gets burned as waste or thrown into waterways and landfills to rot, both of which produce carbon emissions. By pressing the husks into a building material, that carbon stays locked up.
[We need to work toward] a future where building cities is no longer an existential threat to the habitability of the planet.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/construction-major-pollution-how-we-build-better_n_5ea3464bc5b6f9639814c009?utm_medium=facebook&ncid=fcbklnkushpmg00000063&utm_campaign=hp_fb_pages&utm_source=main_fb&fbclid=IwAR0WpdeD8nAsoBbQuxObhlF7YEStVll0KxJercV-ISOvbzpGhbAzi05M
*
“You didn’t come into this world. You came out of it, like a wave from the ocean. You are not a stranger here.” ~ Alan Watts
Photo: Haley Hyatt*
"ROCKS, HEAT, AND WATER": VOLCANIC ROCKS AND THE ORIGINS OF COMPLEX LIFE
~ Charles Darwin wrote in 1871 that life first emerged in “warm little ponds”, which he imagined to be small wells of water and chemicals, heated by the sun and surrounded by rocks and air. With these few ingredients and a big dose of randomness, he posited, the basic elements of life clicked together, leading to simple life forms, like bacteria. Their evolution over millions of years eventually led to the sophisticated life forms that now inhabit the planet.
These days, scientists generally agree with the idea that the original recipe for life was pretty simple, but they’re not sure what ingredients were necessary for those early life forms to make the leap into complex forms of life, like animals. Many scientists theorize that, since all complex life — involving cells that have multiple components — now relies on oxygen to breathe, it must have happened at a time when there was plenty of oxygen in the air. But the scientists behind a 2018 study published in Nature report that oxygen in the atmosphere didn’t rise to significant levels until after complex life arose — suggesting that oxygen wasn’t all that important after all.
In previous studies, scientists determined that complex life first emerged around 700 and 800 million years ago, sometime between huge ice ages. The history of oxygen on Earth, meanwhile, is a bit cloudier. Scientists believe there was no oxygen for Earth’s first two billion years, and then, some 2.3 to 2.5 billion years ago, a little bit of oxygen showed up (they can tell because it turned some rocks red with rust-like compounds). But deposits of fossilized charcoal have shown that it wasn’t until at least 400 million years ago that there was enough oxygen in the atmosphere for forest fires to burn. That leaves a 2.1-billion-year period during which there was minimal oxygen — but, strangely, still evidence of life.
At one point in those 2.1 billion years, the geochemists show, the amount of oxygen in the air reached a concentration high enough that it led to the deep sea becoming oxygenated — sometime between 540 and 420 million years ago. They came to this conclusion by looking at rocks formed by undersea volcanoes — in particular, the iron inside them.
Oxygen and iron react in very obvious ways, and the reaction is no different in the underwater rocks. Seawater flowed through them as they first formed, so the iron in the rocks carries the chemical signature of the water. It soon became clear, from the oxidation of the iron, when the sea became full of oxygen.
More importantly, it also became clear that complex life had existed on the Earth long before the oxygenation of the sea took place.
This finding complicates matters for researchers trying to figure out when complex life on Earth emerged, especially those who believe that, since all life breathes oxygen, the event was inextricably tied to the oxygenation of the atmosphere. Since that now doesn’t seem to be the case, scientists must think on different theories, like one posited by scientists in Nature in 2017, suggesting that the explosion of complex life coincided not with a rise in oxygen but with the first big boom in algae growth.
The more we learn about the origins of life, both simple and sophisticated, the more puzzling life seems to be. In some ways, it doesn’t seem to be very complex at all. For the most part, scientists pondering the mystery of life’s origins still think along the same lines as Darwin, proposing that the original recipe really wasn’t very complicated at all — and perhaps could have been cooked up someplace other than Earth. Paul Niles, for one, a planetary geologist with NASA investigating the possibility that life could have emerged on Mars, said in a statement in October 2017 that sometimes, life “doesn’t need a nice atmosphere or temperate surface, but just rocks, heat, and water.”
Since abundant oxygen now doesn’t seem to be all that necessary for simple life to develop into something more, there’s now an even greater possibility that complexity exists somewhere other than here. ~
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/volcanic-rock-discovery-calls-theories-about-life-s-origins-into-question?utm_source=pocket-newtab
*
“People don't notice whether it's winter or summer when they're happy.” ~ Anton Chekhov
*
YOLO
How does one manage to deal with the both evidential and intuitive truth (every cell in my body seems to know that truth) that this life is all there is? My strictly personal answer is “doing the work I love.” As Rilke wrote, “To work is to live without dying.” Then there is simply the enjoyment of life — taking delight in beauty, animals, affection and on and on — a long list. The longer I live, the more grateful I become for life’s abundant gifts. After many years of chronic depression, I am now happily astonished by so much around me, and by life’s constant surprises.
But that's an individual answer. Someone else might reply that happy family life is most important, or being of service to others or working for a worthy cause. There might also be other meaning-charged answers that change with the stage of life (“I learn by going where I need to go”).
The reason I'd like many more people to grow up and stop believing in Santa Claus and Pearly Gates and Everlasting Bliss is that we need all kinds of answers to form a life-sustaining secular philosophy. Sure, I could say humanism is it, but it’s a bit abstract. We need others to help us carry the question of how to deal with mortality.
As for the belief in the afterlife, I like Wittgenstein’s “The real question of life after death isn't whether or not it exists, but even if it does what problem this really solves.”
*
MORALITY AND ATHEISM
~ For centuries in the West, the idea of a morally good atheist struck people as contradictory. Moral goodness was understood primarily in terms of possessing a good conscience, and good conscience was understood in terms of Christian theology. Being a good person meant hearing and intentionally following God’s voice (conscience). Since an atheist cannot knowingly recognize the voice of God, he is deaf to God’s moral commands, fundamentally and essentially lawless and immoral. But today, it is widely – if not completely – understood that an atheist can indeed be morally good. How did this assumption change? And who helped to change it?
One of the most important figures in this history is the Huguenot philosopher and historian, Pierre Bayle (1647-1706). His Various Thoughts on the Occasion of a Comet (1682), nominally dedicated towards taking down erroneous and popular opinions about comets, was a controversial bestseller, and a foundational work for the French Enlightenment. In it, Bayle launches a battery of arguments for the possibility of a virtuous atheist.
He begins his apology on behalf of atheists with a then-scandalous observation:
t is no stranger for an atheist to live virtuously than it is strange for a Christian to live criminally. We see the latter sort of monster all the time, so why should we think the former is impossible?
Bayle introduces his readers to virtuous atheists of past ages: Diagoras, Theodorus, Euhemerus, Nicanor, Hippo and Epicurus. He notes that the morals of these men were so highly regarded that Christians later were forced to deny that they were atheists in order to sustain the superstition that atheists were always immoral. From his own age, Bayle introduces the Italian philosopher Lucilio Vanini (1585-1619), who had his tongue cut out before being strangled and burned at the stake for denying the existence of God. Of course, those who killed Vanini in such a fine way were not atheists. The really pressing question, Bayle suggests, is whether religious believers – and not atheists – can ever be moral.
Bayle concedes that Christians possess true principles about the nature of God and morality (we’ll never know whether Bayle himself was an atheist). But, in our fallen world, people do not act on the basis of their principles. Moral action, which concerns outward behavior and not inward belief, is motivated by passions, not theories. Pride, self-love, the desire for honor, the pursuit of a good reputation, the fear of punishment, and a thousand customs picked up in one’s family and country, are far more effective springs of action than any theoretical beliefs about a self-created being called God, or the First Cause argument.
Left alone to act on the basis of their passions and habitual customs, who will act better: an atheist or a Christian? Bayle’s opinion is clear from the juxtaposition of chapters devoted to the crimes of Christians and chapters devoted to the virtues of atheists. The cause of the worst crimes of Christians is repeatedly identified as false zeal, a passion that masquerades as the love of God but that really amounts to politico-religious partisanship mixed with hatred of anyone who is different. Bayle’s survey of recent religious wars demonstrated in his mind that religious beliefs inflame our more violent tendencies:
We know the impression made on people’s minds by the idea that they are fighting for the preservation of their temples and altars … how courageous and bold we become when we fixate on the hope of conquering others by means of God’s protection, and when we are animated by the natural aversion we have for the enemies of our beliefs.
Atheists lack false religious zeal, so we can expect them to live quieter lives.
*
Yet Bayle does not fully establish the possibility of a virtuous atheist. The kind of behavior that he focuses on is merely superficially good. In Bayle’s time, to be truly good was to have a conscience and to follow it. In the Various Thoughts, he doesn’t declare that atheists can have a good conscience. In fact, Bayle’s pessimism reaches its pinnacle in a thought experiment involving a visit from an alien species. Bayle claims that it would take these aliens less than 15 days to conclude that people do not conduct themselves according to the lights of conscience.
In other words, very few people in the world are, properly speaking, morally good. So atheists are merely no worse than religious believers, and on the surface they might even appear morally superior. While this is less ambitious than claiming that atheists can be completely virtuous, it is still a milestone in the history of secularism.
Bayle expanded on his Various Thoughts twice in his career, once with Addition to the Various Thoughts on the Comet (1694) and again with Continuation of the Various Thoughts on the Comet (1705). In this latter work, Bayle established the foundations of a completely secular morality according to which atheists could be as morally virtuous as religious believers. He begins his discussion of atheism with the strongest objection he could muster against the possibility of a virtuous atheist:
Because [atheists] do not believe that an infinitely holy Intelligence commanded or prohibited anything, they must be persuaded that, considered in itself, no action is either good or bad, and that what we call moral goodness or moral fault depends only on the opinions of men; from which it follows that, by its nature, virtue is not preferable to vice.
The challenge Bayle undertakes is to explain how atheists, who do not recognize a moral cause of the Universe, can nevertheless recognize any kind of objective morality.
He offers an analogy with mathematics. Atheists and Christians will disagree about the foundation of mathematical truths. Christians believe that God is the source of all truth, while atheists do not. However, metaphysical disagreements over the source of the truth of triangle theorems make no difference when it comes to proving triangle theorems.
Christians and atheists all come to the conclusion that the sum of the angles inside every triangle is equal to two right angles. For the purposes of mathematics, theological views are irrelevant. Similarly for morality: whether one believes that the nature of justice is grounded in the nature of God or in the nature of a godless Nature makes no difference. Everyone agrees that justice requires that we keep our promises and return items that we have borrowed.
Bayle’s most surprising argument is that Christians and atheists are in agreement about the source of the truths of morality. The vast majority of Christians believe that God is the source of moral truths, and that moral truth is grounded in God’s nature, not in God’s will or choice. God cannot make killing innocent people a morally good action. Respecting innocent life is a good thing that reflects part of God’s very nature. Furthermore, according to Christians, God did not create God’s nature: it has always been and always will be what it is.
At bottom, these Christian views do not differ from what atheists believe about the foundation of morality. They believe that the natures of justice, kindness, generosity, courage, prudence and so on are grounded in the nature of the Universe. They are brute objective facts that everyone recognizes by means of conscience. The only difference between Christians and atheists is the kind of ‘nature’ in which moral truths inhere: Christians say it is a divine nature, while atheists say it is a physical nature. Bayle imagines critics objecting: how can moral truths arise from a merely physical nature? This is indeed a great mystery – but Christians are the first to declare that God’s nature is infinitely more mysterious than any physical nature, so they are in no better position to clarify the mysterious origins of morality!
According to the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, our age became secular when belief in God became one option among many, and when it became clear that the theistic option was not the easiest one to espouse when theorizing about morality and politics. Through his reflections on atheism over three decades, Bayle demonstrated that resting morality on theology was neither necessary nor advantageous. For that reason, Bayle deserves much credit for the secularization of ethics. ~
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/how-a-huguenot-philosopher-realised-that-atheists-could-be-virtuous?utm_source=pocket-newtab
A Huguenot wedding taking place in secret in a forest, circa 1760*
Oriana:
Even with the secularization of ethics, atheists still keep coming up against the charge that they can’t possibly be as ethical as religious people. After all, they are not afraid of eternal punishment in hell, so what’s to stop them from stealing, lying, and worse? In poll after poll, people say they would not vote for an atheist.
Plenty. In terms of major crimes, there is of course the secular law that imposes heavy penalties. The possibility of a prison sentence is definitely a deterrent. But the average person, religious or not, is not a criminal, and it’s not the fear of punishment that prevents them from committing evil. It’s rather that there is such a thing as conscience, formed early in life thanks to our parents, but developed over the years to include both the empathy for others and the idea of the social contract: we wouldn’t want to live in the kind of world where others are constantly lying, stealing, or otherwise abusing us. Another way of speaking about the social contract is to call it the Golden Rule: treat others as you want them to treat you.
The Golden Rule may sound calculated, but in practice it’s an expression of empathy — instant and uncalculated. Most people prefer not to hurt other people. They feel bad if they do — and, perhaps thanks to our neural wiring as social animals, they feel good if they can help someone in need. Doing good and feeling good go together. Helping others in a tangible manner — especially face to face — is a source of happiness. We get our reward right now, right here — no need for a “reward in heaven.”
Likewise, if we cause injury to another person, we feel bad. If it was truly our fault, we feel ashamed — and ashamed again whenever we remember our bad action, unless we can make amends and/or be explicitly forgiven. Again, there is no need for punishment in hell.
Pierre Bayle (1647-1706)*
OBESITY IS A MAJOR RISK FACTOR FOR COVID-19 INFECTION AT A YOUNGER AGE
~ Though people with obesity frequently have other medical problems, the new studies point to the condition in and of itself as the most significant risk factor, after only older age, for being hospitalized with Covid-19, the illness caused by the coronavirus. Young adults with obesity appear to be at particular risk, studies show.
The research is preliminary, and not peer reviewed, but it buttresses anecdotal reports from doctors who say they have been struck by how many seriously ill younger patients of theirs with obesity are otherwise healthy.
No one knows why obesity makes Covid-19 worse, but hypotheses abound.
Some coronavirus patients with obesity may already have compromised respiratory function that preceded the infection. Abdominal obesity, more prominent in men, can cause compression of the diaphragm, lungs and chest capacity. Obesity is known to cause chronic, low-grade inflammation and an increase in circulating, pro-inflammatory cytokines, which may play a role in the worst Covid-19 outcomes.
The new findings about obesity risks are bad news for all Americans, but particularly for African-Americans and other people of color, who have higher rates of obesity and are already bearing a disproportionate burden of Covid-19 deaths. High rates of obesity are also prevalent among low-income white Americans, who may also be adversely affected, experts say.
More than half of Covid-19 deaths in the United States so far have been in New York and New Jersey, but the new findings mean the coronavirus could exact a steep toll in regions like the South and the Midwest, where obesity is more prevalent than in the Northeast.
Dr. Gulick’s review of data from the first 393 Covid-19 patients admitted to NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center and NewYork-Presbyterian Lower Manhattan Hospital identified obesity as a risk factor for admission. He also found that among adults under the age of 54, half live with obesity, though the New York City obesity rate is only 22 percent.
“Obesity is more important for hospitalization than whether you have high blood pressure or diabetes, though these often go together, and it’s more important than coronary disease or cancer or kidney disease, or even pulmonary disease,” said Dr. Leora Horwitz, the paper’s senior author and director of the Center for Healthcare Innovation and Delivery Science at NYU Langone.
Obesity also appears to be a factor for higher risk of death from Covid-19, though to a lesser degree, Dr. Horwitz said.
Another NYU Langone study, which focused on patients under the age of 60, found that those with obesity were twice as likely to be hospitalized and were at even higher risk of requiring critical care. The association between obesity and more severe disease was not seen in patients over the age of 60.
The severity of the illness often comes as a surprise to younger adults, and “provides another layer of shock to this disease,” the paper’s author, Dr. Jennifer Lighter, said.
More recently, a French study reported that nearly half of 124 Covid-19 patients in Lille, France, had obesity, twice the rate of a comparison group of intensive care patients hospitalized for other reasons last year. The study also reported that the need for mechanical ventilation increased with higher body weight.
At Ochsner Health, a system with 41 hospitals in Louisiana and southern Mississippi, Dr. Leo Seoane, the company’s senior vice president, said that 60 percent of patients hospitalized with Covid-19 had obesity and that obesity appeared to nearly double their risk of requiring a ventilator.
“We in the U.S. have not always identified obesity as a disease, and some people think it’s a lifestyle choice. But it’s not,” said Dr. Matthew Hutter, director of the Weight Center at Massachusetts General Hospital and president of the American Society for Metabolic and Bariatric Surgery. “It makes people sick, and we’re realizing that now.”
Obesity’s link to chronic diseases is well known, but the experience with H1N1 influenza in 2009 revealed that people with obesity are also more vulnerable to infectious diseases. Studies have also shown that they do not get the same protection from influenza vaccinations that others do.
Physicians say patients with obesity can be harder to manage in the hospital setting. They require special beds and imaging equipment, and they are harder to intubate and harder to assess when removing a ventilator.
Advocates for people with obesity say they may also delay seeking care, deterred because they have been treated poorly by health care providers in the past. ~
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/16/health/coronavirus-obesity-higher-risk.html?action=click&module=Top+Stories&pgtype=Homepage&fbclid=IwAR2SOcgIoDbB_iO6Gn7-81jBWHP6wGs-EkZke3Tx51U12jLhHrTJHeZKGXI
*
In the end
It will not matter
That I was a woman. I am sure of it.
The body is a source. Nothing more.
There is a time for it. There is a certainty
About the way it seeks its own dissolution.
Consider rivers. They are always en route to
Their own nothingness. From the first moment
They are going home. And so
When language cannot do it for us,
Cannot make us know love will not diminish us,
There are these phrases
Of the ocean
To console us.
Particular and unafraid of their completion.
In the end
Everything that burdened and distinguished me
Will be lost in this:
I was a voice.
~ Eavan Boland (1944 - April 27, 2020), Anna Liffey
No comments:
Post a Comment