plasticboy

DHH: After two weeks with no covid restrictions in Denmark

NYTimes Opinion Video: Meet the People Getting Paid to Kill Our Planet

Cheapskate's Guide: The Old Internet Shows Signs of Quietly Coming Back

The question is, what do we want from this vaccine? If what we want from this vaccine is protection against serious illness, the current two-dose vaccine strategy for mRNA vaccines, or the two-dose strategy for the J&J [Johnson & Johnson] vaccine, offers protection against serious illness, right up to the present time for all age groups. So if that's the goal, we've reached it. If, on the other hand, the goal is to try and also protect against mild illness, which will fade over time, then you can argue for giving a booster dose, realizing that the protection against mild illness that you're getting from that booster dose will probably last for about 3 to 4 months.

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I recently got an offer from the PreserVim Github organization to take over maintenance of my Markdown Vim plugin and that is its new home. PreserVim adopts Vim plugins that are going unmaintained and tries to at least protect them from bitrot.

I haven't had time to work on vim-markdown in years, but ever since I posted it on Github in 2009 it has lived a life of its own. Contributors took it from a simple syntax file to a full-blown plugin with some awesome features like the table of contents and header increase and decrease commands. I think mine was the first Markdown syntax file for Vim and for a while it was included in the Debian Vim package. After I let it languish a bit, Tim Pope's excellent plugin became the standard and is included in the official Vim distributions.

Here's hoping vim-markdown does well under PreserVim. Maybe I'll even have time to make a few contributions.

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."

Source: How Poor Diet Contributes to Coronavirus Risk

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.

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