I’m an epidemiology professor and I write a weekly “weather report” outbreaks [1]. These communication and data blackouts are coming at a bad time. We’re having an unusual flu season—activity has rebounded unexpectedly. I’ve been having to scramble for data, last week by visiting each state health department website. It’s really troubling and consequential.
This is intentional. They're mad about the covid response, and want to prevent mask mandates or lockdowns at any cost. At any cost. Including suppressing information about bird flu for as long as possible.
I’m curious about what will happen if they get to the parts of this Project 2025 like agenda that involves telling people to do things, or banning things people like.
We already see that abortion bans are unpopular. When they are put to a vote they lose, even in very red states.
How much more will people take? How will the Joe Rogan dudebro crowd react to banning porn? That’ll be interesting.
I’ve been predicting for years that it’s these guys — the Christian Nationalists / NatCons — who are going to mass confiscate guns. Would that be the third rail?
I mean the current game plan, from what it seems, is to make porn a shameful and taboo thing. Same as abortions as well.
There’s a heavy pro-natalism push for obvious reasons, and I have no idea why, but it feels like current government is trying to fix it through wrong methods. They know they’re royally fucked if people having 0-2 kids max.
Those definitely affect the choice, but ultimately, there’s just no real cultural push to have more kids nowadays. Rich people aren’t having kids either, as you can see in top 10%, 1% brackets. Like, I don’t have a single girl friend that even wants 3 kids. Anyone whom I’ve talked to always has a range between 0-2. Can’t blame them. Giving up at the minimum 6 years of your life for no real benefits kinda sucks.
It's a complex issue. IMHO it's only a real problem when birth rates are consistently below replacement or when they fall way below replacement as they are in a few places like Korea.
In that case, step one is to remove obvious barriers like insane housing prices and pervasive workaholism so that people who want to have kids find it easy to do so. Create a culture that is a supportive environment for families.
I don't see the Project 2025 crowd doing much of that. Many of the billionaires backing the project are pushing work cultures and social policies that will have the opposite effect. Think Musk's "hard core" work cultures are conductive to family formation?
I think it's because their real goal is fundamentalist theocracy and/or fascism. Just like the climate protestors who are actually hard-core Marxists or anti-industrial Neo-primitivists hoping to collapse society to realize their vision, these people are "problemists." The problem is a good thing because it's a hook they can use to sell a whole agenda. Solving the problem without implementing that whole agenda would be, to them, a failure.
Christian Nationalists don't want to fix declining birth rates without implementing Christian Nationalism any more than the people throwing paint on works of art in Europe want greenhouse gas emissions fixed without collapsing capitalism.
> I mean the current game plan, from what it seems, is to make porn a shameful and taboo thing. Same as abortions as well.
Uhhh no, they're pushing to make these things illegal. One is a social norm, the other is utilizing the power of the state to assert a specific opinion.
Reach out to the developer behind 91-DIVOC. That won't cover red states that go dark when and if they do, but it was invaluable to me during the covid pandemic.
I'm a CS professor who used to write and develop the software behind a daily and weekly Pennsylvania covid report. I get the pain here. It's a messy, incompatible jumble without the CDC.
Would you like me to see if there are some CS folks here to provide programming support to help with what you're doing?
I -hope- this is transient but I'm not holding my breath either.
I’m an epi professor and longtime HN lurker. I wrote a short essay yesterday about how to think about these mysterious outbreaks [1]. Briefly, the most common outcome is they are determined to be an endemic disease. Less likely is an emerging infectious disease. The most concerning possibility is something novel or highly unexpected.
This is a great article, and for anyone that wants a cheat sheet for the thread (and to double check my read):
* The "endemic disease" bucket describes things like cholera and known influenza strains, and what we're seeing is hazy reporting of flare-ups that happen in low-resource areas around the world on the regular.
* The "emerging infectious disease" bucket describes stuff like Ebola, which is scary but we've got something like a reasonable history of responding and containing to it, if we take it seriously.
* "Novel" is C19, or the first outbreaks of Ebola at the time, the point presumably at which we'd start thinking about novel precautionary measures applied preemptively.
So basically, if it's any of numerous reasonably well-known but very local diseases a fluid's probably going to go colored in some field test kit and say which one, else it could be something known (and often of known substantial concern for large-scale contagion) but too rare or understudied to have cheap robust quick tests yet so that has to be shipped to a real lab (probably with very high biosecurity rating), and if the lab doesn't recognize what they're seeing in their electron microscope and has to do fundamental research first to get a good biochemical profiling it's something truly expanding the boundaries of known infectious pathology?
I don't exactly want to dispute that, but I would like to remark it's not entirely clear-cut.
SARS-CoV-2 response could be as rapid as it was in no small part because two decades of research on SARS-CoV more or less was applicable, and looking at genetic similarity alone contemporary variants of SARS-CoV-2 are now more different from the original strain isolated in Wuhan than that strain is different from SARS-CoV.
So was the threat from pathogenic Coronaviruses really novel? To a degree, and depending on what aspects one chooses to emphasize maybe.
Also, I'd say the pathogen itself doesn't necessarily need to do the changing in the context of emerging diseases. I'd take it to mean they have potential to become more prevalent or have a more significant impact, but that could easily also be due to changes in conditions, including human behavior.
> I would like to remark it's not entirely clear-cut
Are you saying this as an epidimeologist? (I'm not an epidimeologist. I've only studied the math.)
> looking at genetic similarity alone
Epidimeology is the study of disease in a population. You can't look at the virus alone.
The dividing line between emerging and novel is brighter than between emerging and existing. It has to do with whether the population has pre-existing immunity. SARS-CoV infection conferred no immunity to SARS-CoV-2. Getting infected with the Alpha variant, on the other hand, conferred immunity to Omega.
> I'd say the pathogen itself doesn't necessarily need to do the changing in the context of emerging diseases. I'd take it to mean they have potential to become more prevalent or have a more significant impact, but that could easily also be due to changes in conditions, including human behavior
Literally in the Wikipedia. "EIDs may also result from spread of an existing disease to a new population in a different geographic region, as occurs with West Nile fever outbreaks."
[1] https://caitlinrivers.substack.com