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Do you know of an overview of the allegations of inappropriate touching against Biden by someone sane?  Or where to find his platform?  Its just so hard to find factual information and level-headed analysis of US politics, especially from outside my urban, universitied, pale-skinned bubble.

One thing I have seen argued is that a lot of black voters are impressed that Biden spent eight years playing second fiddle to a black man without any sign of resentment, and people who are keen about the Democratic Party like that he has been a trusty part of it for a long time.

That is what the Spanish and the mayor of Nembro near Bergamo found: death rates were 3-5 times normal, of which 1 was the normal death rate, 1 was deaths attributed to covid-19, and the other 1-3 was unknown but probably a lot of cases of coronavirus.  And there is no way to sort this out except researching one jurisdiction at a time to understand how they define their terms and who gets tested and how statistics from lower levels of government are combined into regional and national totals.

People in the UK, is it only from abroad that UK news coverage feels super creepily weird right now? Like, when Italy and Spain were clocking up the sorts of death tolls the UK is now exceeding, it was portrayed in the UK media as unimaginable horror and catastrophe, and now it's happening in the UK and NHS staff are dying for lack of PPE it's... just not being treated like that at all, it seems? Everyone keeps saying "well maybe it'll level off soon" even as the active case numbers keep going up pretty fast, and from a lot of the reports you'd think everything was much more in hand than the death statistics indicate.

The only British media I follow these days is the Guardian (and that not so regularly, the online site makes it so hard to separate the news from clickbaity opinion pieces) but I have watched a few US and UK sources sink back to staring at themselves, reporting policies introduced in South Korea in January as something exciting and new and discovering asymptotic transmission at the end of March not the start of February when it appeared on preprint servers and American blogs.  The quick rise of the death rate is very sad even though much of that is not identifying infected people earlier.

They printed the thing about the Johnson government missing three chances to join a large EU purchase of PPE.

How is the talk about re-opening parliament going?  Or the new Labour leader's position with respect to the Tories?

Could someone give me background on Simon Jenkins, the elderly columnist with an arts background who wrote a piece on the theme "the evidence is not good enough to justify sending everyone home" in early March and then a series defending his own judgement?  There are all kinds of uncertainties, but as with climate science, things could easily be worse than the 'safe middle ground' projections from scientists!

SORA in Austria has released the results of their test of a representative sample of the population for covid-19!  Out of 1,544 residents tested between 1 and 6 April, 0.33% (five?) returned positive.  That is 3 times the rate of diagnosed cases at that date.  If the sample was representative, that is strong evidence that less than 1% of the population were infected at that date three weeks after the beginning of stay-at-home.

https://www.sora.at/nc/news-presse/news/news-einzelansicht/news/covid-19-praevalenz-1006.html

My estimate was that somewhere between 1% and 10% were infected by 15 March, so I was wrong.

Bommer and Vollmer estimated that 1% of the population of Austria was infected on 31 March by comparing diagnosed infections on one date with the deaths 14 days later and assuming that deaths represent around 1% of the true number of cases.

Tirol is ending its self-isolation and the quarantine of all 279 communities (a few remote communities are still under specific quarantines) on Tuesday 7 April.

Austria has introduced its first odd law: an obligation to use shopping carts in large suparmarkets to keep customers separated. 

And two Innsbruck professors of constitutional law have written an opinion piece explaining: no, you can't make everyone wear a tracker, Austria is a country of laws and after '45 we planted a constitutional forest from Wien to Vorarlberg that a little wind like that can't blow over http://www.foederalismus.at/blog/stellungnahme-zur-verfassungskonformitaet-einer-verpflichtenden-tracking-app_230.php

I have decided to experiment with some historical recipes.  I don't yet have the Baghdad cookery-book and I am limited by what the local supermarkets and greengrocers and butchers carry but I have worked through things like chicken in pomegranate sauce.

Thanks for sharing!  I hope I have energy for more substantive comments later.  What is War of Realms?

If you assume that every infected person infects 2-3 others in the circumstances of normal life and people who have been infected once are immune for the next few years, then you achieve herd immunity when 60-80% of the population have been infected.  But since February, there have been epidemiologists who believe that the true number was more like 4 or 5 new infections per patient in China before the lockdown (https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.02.18.20024315) and they tell me that in that case, there is no way to just let the virus race through the less vulnerable population then die out.

A lot of these fashionable online conference and chat systems sound impossible for anyone, and especially an introvert, to manage: too many things flashing at you at once and demanding instant replies.

Also, at the start of this week, after two weeks of stay-at-home and three weeks of closed schools, the government believed that covid-19 was spreading in ?AT? or Tirol as fast as a seasonal flu spreads in a normal winter with people out working and drinking and partying and exercising together.  So they brought in the masks for shoppers and probably some other tweaks in hopes of bringing the number of people infected by each infected person closer to 1. 

Nobody knows how many are sick or dying (the test of essential workers suggests that Austria has only identified 20% of people with covid-19) but the public health workers are worried. 

I am sorry, I keep talking about serious things.

Lets give it a week or two.  This may be the phase in the story where we have conversations like "our entrenchments are holding!  With the hill on one side and the marsh on the other the tyrants and their slaves can't get through.  Gracchus, have your men reported anything on the rustling from the reedbeds?" "No, imperator, they went 50 paces into the marsh and they did not see anything."  "Right, so lets move on to logistics ... Perses, how many amphorae of wine have you scrounged up?  If the number is not high enough I will sell you to the Parthians!"

If parts of Europe and some Anglo settler countries manage to contain the disease by May, reducing travel restrictions will be a mess.  If it goes out of control in some Canadian provinces, US states, and Schengen countries but is contained in others, how can you allow travel without opening the floodgates to infectious people?

My understanding is that herd immunity is only possible if you accept the low estimates for infectivity and assume that infected people are immune for an extended period of time.  If you accept the high estimate for infectivity, or assume that people infected can be infected again a few months later, then more than 90% of the population could be infected before the disease starts to become rare.

El País in Madrid reports the same thing as the mayor from Lombardy: official death figures show coronavirus doubling the normal death rate, but three to five more deaths from all causes are being registered than in the same region last year.

https://elpais.com/sociedad/2020-03-27/el-coronavirus-causa-mas-muertes-de-las-detectadas.html

The situation is so unusual that Americans are actually acknowledging sources written outside their country in a language other than English during their lifetime!

Meanwhile, the curve in British Columbia continues to flatten.  And patreon pledges are up 13%, and amount pledged up 16%, over the previous month for the first time since they finished shooting themselves in the foot in 2018.

Update: Random sample of 1.161 people in key occupations (care homes, hospitals, supermarkets) in Austria on 29/30 March: 6 tested positive for covid-19 (0.5%)  That is similar to Iceland's results earlier in March, and lower than I expected.

I had what was probably a bad flu in late February and early March, a lot of people I know have or had flu-like symptoms.  It would be interesting to know whether one kind of dreaded lurgie makes you more vulnerable to the other.

So some of the people who are out sick will just have colds/flu/stress-related symptoms, but people with public-facing jobs are exposed to a lot of respiratory ailments- and its easier to deal with a cold or a flu when you are sure its something not so dangerous and that your job will still exist when you recover.

Austria plans to test a random sample (Stichprobe) of 2,000 residents starting today.  I will be interested to see whether there are more like 20 or 200 positive.

If the number of confirmed cases, 10,000 in a population around 9 million, represented the state of the pandemic, we would expect about 2 people to test positive (plus a few false positives).  If you believe that, I have a nice rug merchant in Isfahan who I would like to introduce you to.

All I can find in the tablets is the words of Ea the Wise:

Abandon riches, seek survival!
Spurn property, save life!

(Standard Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh, XI.25-26)