More Cactus More Perfidy

Greetings fellow travelers on Biosphere One.  Tomorrow is Earth Day.  Earth has been having a pleasant time of it as of late, since all of her parasites are sheltering in place and not polluting the atmosphere.  Jim and I are viewing a summer's long lock down with great trepidation.  What does one DO all day?  The original plan had been to ride or hike early in the morning, futz around for awhile and then go to the pool and do laps dog paddling.  I can't swim but I can do a mean dog paddle.  Alas alack, the pool is closed.  Even if Ducey (our governor) cancels the stay at home order, we don't know if that translates to opening the pool.  He ordered golf courses to stay open, but ours is closed.  So who knows. My internal resources are drying up.

Today was a hike day.  It was warm.  We walked the slog up to the Sarasota trail, and then the steep slog up to the ridge line.  It was windy then, now it is just howling outside.  The teddy bears continue their bloom.

I love this saguaro corpse.  It looks vaguely like religious iconography, I think.

Saguaros bloom, but generally on the top of their very tall selves, so we don't get to see them.  But look, here we have blooming at the end of an arm.  How cool is that????  Look at all of the buds.

This arm provides us with an excellent view of the flowers.  Later there will be fruit, which I have heard is edible and kind of good.

The cholla across the street.

I feel bad about this dove.  She and her mate have built three poorly constructed dove nests in this palm tree.  It's right next to the driveway, and so they drop twigs on the pavers, and they poop on the pavers and we would really like them to nest elsewhere.  So we dismantle the nests, and they come back with more twigs.  One wonders how much time they're going to put into this effort.

There has been much reading today.  In no particular order we have the following.

For weeks the administration touted hydroxychloriquine, sometimes in combination with azithromicin.  These are dangerous drugs that can both cause long QT syndrome which can result in death.  A retrospective study was performed looking at the outcomes of hydroxychlorquine with and without azithromycin in VA hospitals.

CONCLUSIONS: In this study, we found no evidence that use of hydroxychloroquine, either with or without azithromycin, reduced the risk of mechanical ventilation in patients hospitalized with Covid-19. An association of increased overall mortality was identified in patients treated with hydroxychloroquine alone. These findings highlight the importance of awaiting the results of ongoing prospective, randomized, controlled studies before widespread adoption of these drugs.

Today the NIH has officially said that it's not a safe or effective drug.  I find it really aggravating that the president of the United States would promote a drug based on hearsay from France and Rudy Giuliani. The unqualified opinions of Drs. Drew, Oz and Phil lead to shortages of a drug legitimately used to treat Lupus. It's time to bring back science in medical decision making.

From Politico and many other new sources we learned that:

The Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday reaffirmed its support for the U.S. intelligence community’s conclusion that the Russian government interfered in the 2016 presidential election with the goal of putting Donald Trump in the Oval Office.

Tuesday's bipartisan report, from a panel chaired by North Carolina Republican Richard Burr, undercuts Trump's years of efforts to portray allegations of Kremlin assistance to his campaign as a "hoax," driven by Democrats and a “deep state” embedded within the government bureaucracy.

The Russians did it, and they're doing it again.   Too bad the bulk of the cyber security people have been let go, we could have used them to ensure fair elections.  I would like to add that the committee's support was bipartisan and unanimous.

WAPO has published an updated time line of what the president knew, when it was known, and when he failed to do anything about it.  It's even worse than we knew.

The CDC is warning that the next wave of Covid-19 is going to be even worse than this one.

“There’s a possibility that the assault of the virus on our nation next winter will actually be even more difficult than the one we just went through,” CDC Director Robert Redfield said in an interview with The Washington Post. “And when I’ve said this to others, they kind of put their head back, they don’t understand what I mean.”

“We’re going to have the flu epidemic and the coronavirus epidemic at the same time,” he said.  Having two simultaneous respiratory outbreaks would put unimaginable strain on the health-care system, he said. The first wave of covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, has already killed more than 42,000 people across the country. It has overwhelmed hospitals and revealed gaping shortages in test kits, ventilators and protective equipment for health-care workers.

It would be nice if the summer could be spent acquiring PPE, test kits, ventilators and all of the rest, but I suspect the orange one will be too busy having mini-rallies at 5:00 eastern, tweeting and golfing.

OK, here's something positive.   It's safe to go outside.

“Outdoors is safe, and there is certainly no cloud of virus-laden droplets hanging around,” said Lidia Morawska, professor and director of the International Laboratory for Air Quality and Health at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia.

“Firstly, any infectious droplets exhaled outside would be quickly diluted in outdoor air, so their concentrations would quickly become insignificant,” Dr. Morawska said. “In addition, the stability of the virus outside is significantly shorter than inside. So outside is not really a problem, unless if we are in a very crowded place — which is not allowed now anyway. It is safe to go for a walk and jog and not to worry about the virus in the air, and there is no need for an immediate washing of the clothes.”

A run through the washer and dryer will kill the virus, so you're good.  We don't have to be afraid of our clothing.