Preventing the Next Pandemic
Tom Friedman notes that there's still no plan to prevent the next pandemic. He complains mostly about wet markets but the increasing global demand for animal protein in general is a huge problem as well.
Tom Friedman notes that there's still no plan to prevent the next pandemic. He complains mostly about wet markets but the increasing global demand for animal protein in general is a huge problem as well.
Title says it all. NutriXiv Preprints
I also appreciated this video explainer from Garth Davis.
"Only 12 percent of Americans are without high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes or pre-diabetes," he said in an interview last week. "The statistics are horrifying, but unlike Covid they happened gradually enough that people just shrugged their shoulders. However, beyond age, these are the biggest risk factors for illness and death from Covid-19."
Researchers have long issued warnings about the consequences of our livestock-dominated food system. After the Sars outbreak in 2003, an essay in the American Journal of Public Health lamented that "changing the way humans treat animals – most basically, ceasing to eat them or, at the very least, radically limiting the quantity of them that are eaten – is largely off the radar as a significant preventive measure." In 2016, the UN Environment Program warned that the "livestock revolution" was a zoonotic disaster waiting to happen.Yet meat consumption continues to rise. Now, just as experts predicted, eating animals is coming back to bite us.
Source: The Covid-19 pandemic shows we must transform the global food system
In the CDC data, the likelihood of a Covid-19-related ICU admission was 2.2% to 2.4% in those without pre-existing medical conditions and 13.3% to 14.5% in those with such conditions. Despite these stark facts, health authorities have remained largely silent about underlying conditions. There has been no call to reduce coronavirus mortality by bringing diabetes or blood pressure under better control, or even to stop smoking. The "flatten the curve" strategy calls for handwashing, social distancing, and masks to slow the progression of the virus through the population. When these steps fail, as they often do, underlying conditions set the stage for rapid progression to a fatal outcome.
Interesting Twitter thread from NYC ER doc on current status of hospitals
BBC:
By their mere existence, vegans force people to confront their cognitive dissonance. And this makes people angry.
One popular way to resolve cognitive dissonance is by reasoning our way out of it…
In the case of meat, this "motivated reasoning" might lead people to find explanations for why eating animals is the correct decision. And one of these is that vegans are bad.
Comparing the Same Project in Rust, Haskell, C++, Python, Scala and OCaml
Things I Learnt The Hard Way (in 30 Years of Software Development)