A friend sent me this link, which may capture how some students (and teachers) feel about the shift to online classes. Trigger warning: features a ukulele.
Myself, I’m OK with online instruction for small classes. Not quite as good as in-person, but seems an OK substitute under the circumstances. Then again, the students might have different views.
Running a big class online seems like it would (will?) be a totally different challenge.
Woman killed after trying to pet alligator. File in the stranger-than-fiction department:
This is only the third known alligator-caused fatality in South Carolina’s modern history, so how could the woman be expected to know that petting an alligator was a bad idea?
No, this isn’t a cheery post. I want to discuss three aspects of the news that three Trump-Pence staff members have tested positive for COVID-19. (That’s Trump’s military valet, Pence’s press secretary, and now a “personal assistant” to Ivanka Trump.)
The first point is that these results strongly suggest the folly of having staff go around without masks for fear someone might take their picture. It’s really dumb.
The second point is that these results show the complete hypocrisy of the Trump administration’s failure to go all-out for a national max testing policy: the White House will respond to this news by doing more testing — something it says the rest of the country doesn’t need.
As the links above show, both these points are getting some airing.
But there’s a third point I haven’t seen in the news yet: no test is totally reliable. I read that some people in the White House are being tested every day. Let’s assume that the White House has the best test. What’s the rate of false positives for asymptomatic people? I can’t figure it out. I read that, at least under lab conditions, Abbot’s new test for people who have had symptoms for a couple of weeks is very very accurate: 99.9% specificity, or about one false positive out of a thousand healthy patients, and 100% sensitivity, or a complete lack of false negative results in patients confirmed to have had COVID-19. But that’s for people with full-blown disease, and also it’s not clear if anyone is using it yet.
What the false positive rate might be for asymptomatic people will vary with the test, and the quality of the implementation. If it’s 99.9% then ignore all of what follows. But suppose the accuracy rate is ‘only’ 99%. In other words, suppose that 1 out 100 flagged as positive are in fact not carrying the virus. What are the odds of a false result if someone is tested every day?
The way you work that out, if I remember Freshman math, is to take the odds of the thing not happening (.99), and multiply it by itself for the number of events. So (.99) to the 30th power gives you the odds that all that month’s tests will be accurate, which google tells me is about .74. So there’s about a 1 in 4 chance of an erroneous result if we use a test that is 99% accurate on one person for 30 days. That’s pretty high. Increase the number of people being tested daily, and the odds of a false positive on someone go up quickly.
So maybe they don’t all have it. But it’s still very likely that at least some of them do, and given the no-mask rule, there’s a quite decent chance they will have exposed someone else.
That said, in the grand scheme of things, a 1% false positive rate is not much to worry about — the victim quarantines unnecessarily, but no one else is harmed. It’s the false negatives that are the worrying problem, because they allow the unknowing to go out and spread the disease. And we also don’t know what the false negative rate for asymptomatic persons is for whatever test the White House is using. Want to bet it’s not below 1%?
Apparently, the official policy of the Justice Department at this moment is that if you are a Trump administration member, the following conduct is not worth prosecuting:
Mr. Flynn … was not forthcoming with Vice President Mike Pence about his conversations with Mr. Kislyak.
Mr. Flynn eventually admitted that those discussions were part of a coordinated effort by the president’s aides to make foreign policy before they were in power, which undermined the policy of President Barack Obama.
Mr. Flynn also lied in federal filings about his lobbying work for the Turkish government, court papers show.
And, furthermore, the FBI should not treat Trump administration members suspected of colluding with foreign governments as if they were — wait for it — suspects. As the Justice Department revealed in its court filing, by asking about meetings with foreign government representatives,
the [FBI] questioning “was untethered to, and unjustified by, the F.B.I.’s counterintelligence investigation into Mr. Flynn” and that the case did not meet the legal standard that Mr. Flynn’s lies be “materially” relevant to the matter under investigation.
And let’s not even talk about Flynn’s apparent perjury in court and maybe out of it too.
Is it any surprise, therefore, that
In a possible sign of disagreement with the Justice Department decision, Brandon L. Van Grack, the department lawyer who led the prosecution of Mr. Flynn, abruptly withdrew from the case on Thursday.
Add it all to the list.
You know, on days like today, I don’t care what happened in a hallway in 1993, or whether Biden is as sharp as butter. Maybe I’m a bad person. Or maybe there really is too much at stake.
Update: More details about just how weird and horrible today’s decision to (attempt to) abort the Flynn case — after he’d had guilty pleas accepted twice — can be found in this excellent analysis by Marcy Wheeler.
“Biden Campaign Considering Using The Internet To Attract Voters”
Naturally, it’s from The Onion.
Actually, I got a genuine email from the Biden campaign today. It was awful. It invited me to a virtual fundraiser with Pete Buttigieg. How the Biden people ever thought that was the way to win my vote, or my dollar, I can’t imagine.
Remember how I said a few days ago that the brutal ads were just beginning? Here’s another one, this time about A Horrifying Illness:
Fortunately, the ad assures us, the “Terrifying Illness” has a cure, which can be applied on Nov. 3, 2020.
The ad is signed by something calling itself “the Sanity Project” — whatever that is. It’s not clear whether they have an actual budget that will allow them to do more than put it online via an account with at this moment has 26 subscribers.
A user going by the name of “Bob Woodiwiss” put the video on YouTube — of course it may or may not be an actual Bob Wodiwiss, and if it is one then it may or may not be the same Bob Woodiwiss who wrote for the Cincinnati Magazine. That guy, incidentally, sounds like a character.
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