Category: Health

No Big Deal, Then

Illegal immigrants, Lies and Untruths, Plagues and Poxes

Speaking of those manky ICE detainment centers, it seems that some illegal aliens have been dying of Covid.  Of course, that’s just terrible, according to the Usual Suspects, but some smart guy at Blueberry Town has taken a look at the actual numbers, applied some appropriate statistical methods and inferences, and sucked the air right out of the narrative:

The upshot is that ICE has been testing the heck out of the detainees in its facilities. As of September 11, there are only 20,138 detainees in ICE facilities (down from an average of >50,000 in 2019), and ICE has administered more than 35,000 Covid-19 tests. Recognizing that people cycle through these facilities at varying rates, it is safe to assume that ICE has tested a solid majority of its detainees during the last six months, and possibly the vast majority.

The agency has found 5,810 cases of Covid-19, for a “positivity rate” from testing at an ugly 16.6%. That is the sort of rate that gets journalists screaming at governors, fun banned, and schools firmly virtual.

Sounds horrible, right?  Nazzo fast, Guido:

But only 6 detainees have died of the Covid. That is a case-fatality ratio of… 0.1%. Compare that number to the observed case fatality rates in various countries, which are massively higher. The Covid-19 case fatality rate in ICE detention centers is right in line with the seasonal flu. That made us curious.

There might be several explanations for this. ICE facilities might have excellent health care. Well, maybe, but that would be a narrative-buster of the first order. Indeed, a recent whistleblower has contended that at least one ICE facility has under-reported Covid-19 cases, which would suggest an even lower case-fatality rate than indicated by the dashboard.

Through the same link, there seems to be data that says that the median age of people deported from ICE facilities is 30. By comparison, the median age in the United States is about 38. The population in ICE facilities, therefore, is almost certainly significantly younger than the United States in general.

Furthermore, eyeballing that chart above, the ICE facilities seem to have very few people over the age of 70, which represents the preponderance of Covid-19 fatalities in the general US population.

There’s all sorts of other geeky goodness in the article, and I would earnestly recommend that you read all of it.  But the executive summary?

There’s not a whole lot to panic about — not on this topic anyway.

Sorry, Commies.  Find another issue to care about.

Miracle Pill?

Health

Most vitamins are useless — at least, they’re at best harmless (unless overdosed, of course) — because most of it is just passed through urine.  It must be true because I read that in an encyclopedia (my Junior Readers can ask their grandparents to explain how the Internet was once all contained on paper, in leather-bound books — also ask for an explanation of “books”).

Where was I?  Oh yeah, vitamins.

Turns out that some are actually quite useful, at least until next week, when another group of “scientists” will tell us that Vitamin D gives us congenial herpes or something.

As you can probably guess from the above, I don’t set much store by vitamins;  the only one I do take religiously is the aforesaid Vitamin D, because I don’t go out into the sunshine a lot (I can get sunburned walking to the mailbox, hello Texas), and my doctor said I should or else Bad Things would most certainly happen to me.  In fact, when I go for my annual checkup, it’s the one thing he’s most careful to ask me about.  “Still taking that Vitamin D 1000u each day?  Good.  Keep doing that.”

Turns out that’s a Good Thing, for all the reasons explained in this little piece (via Insty once more;  thankee, Squire).

Of course, there’s a catch.  No, not the herpes thing, I just made that up.  Turns out that for my age, a daily 800-1000u is just the ticket;  but too much can make the telemores too long, which is a Bad Thing.

No, I don’t have the foggiest either;  you’ll just have to read it all for yourself.

Never Mind That Yellow Snow

Bad News, Food & Drink, Health

…watch out for the radioactive shrimp instead:

The Food and Drug Administration is warning U.S. consumers not to eat certain frozen shrimp products sold at Walmart over concerns they contain radioactive isotope Cesium-137.

In a press release Tuesday, the FDA said they were investigating reports of Cs-137 contamination in shipping containers and frozen shrimp being imported by Indonesian company BMS Foods after it was detected by customs officers at four US ports.

Now to be sure, this is being done in an excess of caution:  there’s no actual proof that WallyWorld sold any radioactive shrimp, and the levels are well below what the FDA considers as harmful.

But if you’ve got that big shrimp boil scheduled for the weekend family reunion and you bought the stuff from Sam’s Club or its cousin, you may want to consider replacing it from somewhere else.

#WoodstockBrownAcidWarning

Smart Move

Culture, Health, Immigration

To many people, this little move would be astonishing, nay even incredible:

France will ban smoking in all outdoor spaces frequented by children, including beaches, parks and bus stops, the country’s health minister said.

The restrictions will involve creating a perimeter outside schools where members of the public will not be able to smoke a cigarette.

“Tobacco must disappear where there are children,” Catherine Vautrin, the health minister, said in an interview with the Ouest-France newspaper.

The freedom to smoke “stops where children’s right to breathe clean air starts”, she said.

The ban on smoking outdoors will come into force on July 1.

As one of many who has had to endure the clouds of smoke from the Gitanes/Gauloises that form a permanent fixture of any French establishment, I first asked myself:  The French?  Of all people, the French?

It’s like asking them to have only one kind of cheese, or banning wine.  C’est incroyable!

But they’re sneaky, the Frogs, as any old doughboy or G.I. will tell you.  Note this little wrinkle:

Café terraces will be excluded from the ban.

So that lifestyle choice — essentially, involving most of the places outside the home where Frogs would be found smoking — can carry on as before.

It’s the “outdoor spaces frequented by children” that’s the kicker.

If anyone loves them a good strong cigarette more than the French, it’s the… Arabs.  And where there are Arabs, you’ll always find hordes of screaming ill-behaved… children.

If you put those two facts together:  I think that this smoking ban is a subversive move to get Arabs to leave France in disgust.

Inside Information

Advice, Health

Here’s one for my long-suffering Lady Readers:  it turns out that engaging in a simple fitness exercise can provide you with a Big Moment.

The tingly, burning sensation traveled from the bottom of my feet up the back of my taut calves, through my thighs, into my pelvis, up my spine, on towards the crown of my head. Then as I raised myself back up onto my toes, it traveled back down my body again. My calves burned but so did other parts of my body – parts that shouldn’t be at 9.15am on a Tuesday, as I stood in my gym kit trying to increase my core strength as I trained for a half marathon. It was pain, but it was also, unmistakably, pleasure.

It was – and I apologize if you’re eating your breakfast as you read this – an orgasm.

I mean, think about it:  you can get a Big O without all that hassle of involving a partner, or touching yourself inappropriately under the desk, or messing up the bed (if you’re doing it properly, that is).

And you can even get it while doing something healthy:  a two-fer, to use retail-speak.

No need to thank me, ladies;  it’s all part of the service.

And for the rest of you:  it seems like this is a girls-only phenomenon, sorry.  You’ll just have to do what you normally do to get yours.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course.

Secret Fears

Health

I am surprisingly sympathetic to this story from writer Bryony Gordon:

What if I had done something awful to someone on the Tube the evening before and blanked it out because I was secretly a psychopath? Had I accidentally sent my child to school with a water bottle full of bleach? Had I emailed a terrible, abusive message to her teacher and deleted it from my sent items to hide the evidence? 

The “blanked out” thing is what caught my attention.

Many years ago, I was afflicted with terrible PTSD dreams.  I mean the kind of dreams where you wake up shaking in terror — all horribly violent, all involving death (my own) — and they happened often, sometimes three times a week.  And they were also repetitive, revolving around being attacked by lions, and getting into a street fight being two examples.

But they weren’t the worst.  I actually learned to cope with those dreams after a while, by simply recognizing them as they began to unfold, and forcing myself to wake up before they got any worse.  Now, I only get them maybe once a year, and they’re easily overcome.

The worst of my dreams, however, is where I become two characters in a murder mystery:  a cop or investigator of some kind on the track of a serial killer, a killer whose murders are gruesome and revolting.  And part of the investigation is my seeming ability to visualize the murders as they’re taking place — as portrayed in the movie The Eyes Of Laura Mars. 

After a while (in the dream), the realization would begin to dawn that the reason I could visualize the gruesome murders was that I was the murderer, and this manifested itself in the dreadful fear of discovery.

I would wake up, and so realistic were the dreams that in process of awakening I would ask myself if I actually was a murderer in real life and had somehow managed to get away with the killing.  The feeling of horror (at being that kind of person and of being discovered) was as strong in my semi-wakened state as it had been in the dream.

It would take me a long time, as much as an hour of rational thinking, to dispel those fears.

Fortunately, I haven’t had one of those dreams in a couple of years.  Maybe they’re gone — I certainly hope so.

I cannot imagine that feeling of dread happening to me in an awakened state.  It must be awful, just terrible;  and that’s why I’m sympathetic towards Bryony Gordon.

Nobody deserves to have the mind play such foul tricks on them.

An afterthought:  many times, these kinds of dreams and hallucinations are caused by psychotropic drugs, taken to suppress things like feelings of panic or depression.  Mine weren’t, because I’ve never taken such drugs;  that’s why they’re all the more terrifying.

I’ve tried to analyze why I get them.  The most plausible explanation is that when writing fiction, writers have to envision the plot from both sides of the mystery so that the plot doesn’t have holes in it.  And even if I’m not in the process of writing a book, I’m always developing plots and storylines in my head.  I haven’t done any such writing for a while, now, and maybe that’s why I haven’t had those dreams recently.

I just hope that writing about them today doesn’t cause a re-occurrence.