Donald Trump Brings a Pocketknife to a Gunfight at the Easter Showdown

Donald Trump, meet Biology. I don’t believe you’ve ever met anyone quite like Biology before.

Biology doesn’t care about your threats or your bombast. Your lawyers can’t sue Biology out of existence. You can’t sway Biology by dangling your hush money. You can’t grab Biology by the pussy. Biology doesn’t care if you pound the podium and yell at it. Biology doesn’t care if you accuse it of being stupid. Biology doesn’t care that you are Commander in Chief. Your bombs and missiles mean nothing to Biology. Temporarily propping up the stock market with funny money means nothing to Biology. Biology didn’t care when you blame Coronavirus on Chinese people. Biology doesn’t care about your fantasies that national borders are somehow relevant to Coronavirus. Biology doesn’t care about fake news. Biology doesn’t care that you think you are smarter than career scientists and health care professionals. Biology doesn’t care when you assure the nation that you have an amazing brain trust consisting of people like Mike, Jared and Ivanka.

It appears that you’ve shown up to a gunfight with a pocketknife.

You can stand up to your podium and deny how Biology operates, but Biology will eventually have its own day at its own podium and Biology won’t respond using cheap words. Biology will speak in terms of hundreds of thousands of dead bodies. Biology will speak in terms of thousands of people who could have been saved had you taken this situation seriously earlier, when you had the opportunity to act. If thousands of people needlessly die, this should upset Americans, because we get upset even if one airplane crashes, killing 200. Instead of sounding the alarm to protect thousands of people, however, you denied facts and wasted time. Here’s a sampling of your pronouncements:

Jan. 22: “We have it totally under control.” Feb. 2: “Well, we pretty much shut it down coming in from China.” Feb. 10: “By April, you know, in theory, when it gets a little warmer, it miraculously goes away.” Feb. 24: “The Coronavirus very much under control in the USA. … Stock Market starting to look very good to me!” Feb. 26: “The risk to the American people remains very low.” At the same time, The Post reported, “Trump’s advisers struggled to get him to take the virus seriously,” despite telling him that “the virus was likely to dominate life in the United States for many months.”

Instead of immediately putting resources where they were needed, testing and ventilators, you told the nation that everything was fine. Everything was OK. And then you told Americans that they should pack the churches on Easter because (you have claimed) that day is somehow important to you. Perhaps you chose this date to pack churches because you and your evangelical friends are planning to roll out a faith-healing cure to the Coronavirus.

You won’t need to spend the upcoming days figuring out how to argue that this mess is not your fault, because you are already really good at deflecting blame. You are always well prepared to tell the world how smart you are and how other people are idiots. Spewing self-enhancing lies is clearly your main priority.

I admit that it’s possible that the Coronavirus might simply melt away with the spring warmth and that it might not kill a million Americans. This is possible, even though it looks highly unlikely given the deaths in Italy, Iran and Spain. Rather than argue about those numbers now, let’s check back in two months to see how things turned out for you and Biology. Truly, let’s check back in a couple months and then we’ll see how your amazingly brilliant plan is working.

If things don’t turn out well, you can always embrace that idea often attributed to Joseph Stalin: “A Single Death is a Tragedy; a Million Deaths is a Statistic.” And maybe you can stir in some social darwinism, drawing from your campaign attack on John McCain. To paraphrase: “I like people who don’t die of Coronavirus.”

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Uttering a Sacred No in the Age of Coronavirus

Many of us are finding it frustrating to distance ourselves from other people during the Coronavirus pandemic and it's not surprising. As human animals, we are wired to be social and this includes introverts like me, at least some of the time. When restraining ourselves from going out to physically spend time with others, it feels like our lives are on hold. it feels like we are doing nothing important. We love bathing in the social froth of face-to-face meetings. It doesn’t seem like we are fully human when we actively bar others from entering our physical spaces. Living in isolation sucks. Each of us is getting an extremely tiny taste of the pain that inmates feel while in solitary confinement.

As we wander around our homes, turning down tempting invitations to visit neighbors and friends and acquaintances, it might seem that we are doing nothing to actively help with the spread of the Coronavirus. It feels disempowering. We need to reframe.

We need to keep in mind that when we say “no” to these temptations to gather with others, we are not doing nothing. We are uttering a sacred no. We are exercising power each and every time we resist this temptation to physically gather together. This sacred “no” is not merely an exercise of power. Each time we say “no,” we are employing a superpower with a logarithmic extension illustrated by this data. Uttering the word “no” with unfailing consistency flattens the curve. Scroll down to find the chart in this article showing the dramatic improvement when ¾ of the population exercises social distancing. The effect is so incredibly powerful that it almost seems magical, but these numbers are based on basic biology and basic math. When we say no, we are channeling Archimedes, who once illustrated the power of levers by stating: “Give me the place to stand, and I shall move the earth.” To the extent that we work together to achieve social distancing, we are collectively moving the earth.

It can be frustrating to physically avoid the people we love, but things could have been a lot worse. At moments like these, it’s repeatedly worthwhile to appreciate the magic of the Digital Revolution. The hard work of thousands of very smart people over many decades is allowing us to stay connected in meaningful, albeit imperfect, ways.

Those who are limiting their digital communications to texts and audio should consider video connections such as Facetime and Skype. Video offers many advantages over texts and audio. See here and here. Research has shown that video conversations are much better than audio (e.g., phone calls) for avoiding depression and nurturing social connections. Researchers examined the frequency of in-person, telephone and written social contact, including email. Then they looked at the risk of depression symptoms two years later, adjusting for potential confounding factors including health status, how close people lived from family and preexisting depression. The researchers found that having little face-to-face social contact nearly doubles your risk of having depression two years later. They also reported that having more or fewer phone conversations, or written or email contact, had no effect on depression.

So thank you Digital Revolution, for keeping us from being completely isolated in these trying times. The fact that we can stay connected should give us the social support we need to maintain physical isolation.

The world has become a shockingly small place as this pandemic progresses and each of us has unwittingly become a member of a highly integrated medical/social web. Each of us can and should embrace a phrase attributed to the Hippocratic Oath: “Do no harm.” Interestingly, that phrase does not appear in the Hippocratic Oath, but this one does: “Into whatever homes I go, I will enter them for the benefit of the sick, avoiding any voluntary act of impropriety or corruption . . .” The modern version of the Hippocratic Oath provides.

I will prevent disease whenever I can, for prevention is preferable to cure.

I will remember that I remain a member of society, with special obligations to all my fellow human beings, those sound of mind and body as well as the infirm.

Let us work together to live by these Hippocratic principles.

Repeatedly saying no to the temptation to socialize with others might seem disorienting, nonchalant, frustrating and boring, but living these principles is extremely strong medicine during this pandemic. Your frustration and boredom are small prices to pay for saving many thousands of lives. You are being a hero to the extent that you are consistently say no.

Stay safe.

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How to Prepare for Coronavirus in the U.S.

According to this article in Scientific American, stockpiling and hoarding supplies is not a solution.

The reality is that there is little point “preparing“ for the most catastrophic scenarios some of these people envision. As a species, we live and die by our social world and our extensive infrastructure—and there is no predicting what anybody needs in the face of total catastrophe. In contrast, the real crisis scenarios we’re likely to encounter require cooperation and, crucially, “flattening the curve” of the crisis exactly so the more vulnerable can fare better, so that our infrastructure will be less stressed at any one time.

. . .

The infectiousness of a virus, for example, depends on how much we encounter one another; how well we quarantine individuals who are ill; how often we wash our hands; whether those treating the ill have proper protective equipment; how healthy we are to begin with—and such factors are all under our control. After active measures were implemented, the R0 for the 2003 SARS epidemic, for example, went from around three, meaning each person infected three others, to 0.04. It was our response to SARS in 2003 that made sure the disease died out from earth, with less than a thousand victims globally.

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Having Few Friends is Dangerous to your Health

Here's a good incentive to turn off your TV and go make real friends.

[C]lose relationships with children and other relatives had very little impact on how long you live, but people with the most friends tended to outlive those with the fewest by 22 percent. Better yet, a clinical review of nearly 150 studies found that people with strong social ties had a 50 percent better chance of survival, regardless of age, sex, health status, and cause of death, than those with weaker ties. . . . In fact, according to the researchers, the health risk of having few friends was similar to smoking 15 cigarettes a day, and more dangerous than being obese or not exercising in terms of decreasing your lifespan. Keep in mind that means real friends. Not Facebook friends or Twitter followers.

For more, here's the full article from Inc.

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Disrupting the Healthcare System

This morning I attended a conference titled “Disruption and Innovation in Healthcare 2.0“ at Washington University in St. Louis. I was humbled at how well informed and nuanced the speakers were. They included Alex Gorsky (CEO of Johnson and Johnson), I certainly learned a lot. My main concern is that the ability to understand the complexity of the health care system is well beyond the ability of most people. The simplistic positions of our politicians are a great disservice to our country. For example, it is absolutely clear that our health care system is NOT a functional market, meaning that the Ayn Rand/Free-Market conservatives are deceiving us when they claim that all we need to do is “get government off our backs” to fix healthcare. I admire that progressive politicians are calling for universal access (something that almost all developed countries have, but not the U.S.). That said, how do we square that universal access with the need to incentivize future innovations, in addition to ongoing care? Any big changes to the current system could have disasterous ramifications.

The stakes could not be higher. To the extent we are tempted to implement broad new changes, we need to keep in mind (as one of today’s speakers said), “This is not a dress rehearsal. It’s the real deal.”

[On the right] Johnson and Johnson CEO, Alex Gorsky

The speakers somberly delivered the following shocking information: There is currently no payment model for many current (and anticipated) extremely expensive curative therapies. Thus, people who can be CURED of horrific diseases will languish under the status quo because we can’t figure out how to give them more than palliative treatment, even when palliative treatment is sometimes more expensive in the long run. I dare you to read previous sentence a few times and then shrug and try to convince yourself that we, as a country cannot do better.

Here’s another fact was mentioned several times today: 75% of our health care budget is the result of bad choices made in early life by individual Americans. Preaching at people to get their act together shouldn’t offend reasonable people. For instance, urging that children should eat healthier food should be applauded, even though some conservatives ridicule Michelle Obama’s urgings in that direction. But what about more? To what extent should we, must we, put some skin in the game for people who are actively self-destructing their bodies? I think we need to seriously look at some low-hanging fruit and make some people uncomfortable for their own well being and for the greater good of the United States. The overall health of the United States is most definitely a public good. The ill-health of any of us affects all of us.

These issues are ultra-complex, highly nuanced, in addition to being critical important. Anyone pretending otherwise should be promptly yanked off the political stage.

Here’s more information about this event. It was being video-recorded and hope that it will be made available to anyone interested in these issues. “2nd Annual Olin Business School Healthcare Symposium: 'Disruption and Innovation in Healthcare 2.0'

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