Six on the Rona: ‘SHE HAS TO BE COUNTED’: A WOMAN’S LIFE AND DEATH IN THE BRONX; Harvard’s Reinhart and Rogoff Say This Time Really Is Different [than 2008]; Juan Cole: Fundamentalist Pandemics; Sweden Stayed Open. A Deadly Month Shows the Risks; Pen
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What Evangelicals Could Learn From The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam
According to the New York Times, several federal agencies reviewed those guidelines and found them “too burdensome for houses of worship.” After all, evangelical ceremonies without choirs? Who could imagine it, given freedom of religion? Forget that one church choir practice in Mount Vernon, Washington, to which 61 singers turned up, “including one who had been fighting cold-like symptoms for a few days,” left 53 of them with Covid-19 and two of them dead from it. And no collection baskets! Yikes, where will the pastor’s salary come from?
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Indeed! However questionable the very idea of the U.S. government paying pastors (or have I blanked on where this fits into the separation of church and state?), it’s but one passing strangeness in a world growing ever stranger. As TomDispatch regular Juan Cole points out today, in spirit we now have a fundamentalist White House that has -- despite its abandoned nuclear deal, sanctions, drone assassinations, and military threats -- something strangely in common with the fundamentalist regime of Iran. Such a unique insight is typical of Cole, whose columns at Informed Comment I read religiously -- if I can use such a word in this context -- every day (and yes, he posts a new one daily, a miracle in itself). Today, he puts the fundamentalist nature of both the Trump administration and Iran’s present government in the context of that most famous of all Iranian books of poems, The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam, of which he’s just produced (as you’ll learn from reading his piece today) a new translation. I’m planning to get my hands on a copy. You should, too. Tom"
"Across Sweden, almost 30 percent more people died during the epidemic than is normal during this time of year, an increase similar to that of the United States and far higher than the small increases seen in its neighboring countries. While Sweden is the largest country in Scandinavia, all have strong public health care systems and low health inequality across the population.
“It’s not a very flattering comparison for Sweden, which has such a great public health system,” said Andrew Noymer, a demographer at the University of California at Irvine. “There’s no reason Sweden should be doing worse than Norway, Denmark and Finland.”
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"Research in a number of countries has shown that Covid-19 can be detected in sewage, including a study in Paris by the city’s water authority which found a direct correlation between levels of the virus in the sewers and the number of infections in the city.
And as cities across the world emerge from lockdown, tracking the rate of Covid-19 in the sewers could provide an early warning if rates of infection begin to rise again
“Most people know that you emit lots of virus through respiratory particles and droplets in the lungs. But actually what’s lesser known is that you actually emit more small viral particles in faeces than you do from the lungs. So, basically we’re using that. Basically tracking people’s toilet movements,” Davey Jones, professor of environmental science at Bangor University in Wales told Reuters.
The technique has already been used in the fight to eradicate Polio and track antibiotic resistance in livestock and could be a cheaper and quicker alternative to the mass testing of individuals to track Covid-19.
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