Voting Trends

Looking through our county (Galveston) votes here: https://results.enr.clarityelections.com/TX/Galveston/106269/web.264614/#/summary and one can see slight traces of the overall national trend even in this mostly red county.

1. More people voted for the presidential election than the senator race 2. Even with less total votes, the Republican Senator took in more votes than the Republican President. So folks stayed true to their party on senate race, but quite a few have voted the other way in presidential race. 3. Mail in votes are significantly higher for democrats (60:40) while in person votes are significantly higher for republicans. Notes: - Data as of Thursday, November 5, 2020, 1:21:02 PM - votes may still be getting tallied - Unofficial results - has not gone through their full audits/checks & balances.

Rent car seats or check them in?

When you are traveling with kids and renting a car at another airport, do you take your car seats with you or do you rent them with your car? 

We travel a lot (back when we could travel) and have tried both options. Over time though, we have moved towards taking the car seats with us almost every trip. Now it's just a booster seat for the younger one and is not much trouble to check that in. 

First question for us has always been the cost. Is the airline going to charge for the extra check in bags? If so, then how does that cost compare with what the rental company is charging? If you are on any of the super budget airlines, make sure to read through their fine print and baggage size policies. 

Your 'status' with the rental car company is also another factor to consider. If you are used to regularly seeing your name up on the board with the car location and you just get in and drive out, then be prepared to spend some extra time at the airport getting car seats. I've never had a car ready to go with seats waiting for me with any rental company here or abroad. Once we even thought about taking the car and buying a seat at a local store while waiting for rental car folk to find us seats. 

If you are taking the car seats with you, you do have the option to take it on the aircraft if the kid has a seat booked. We have never tried this option, so I will leave it at that. I would definitely factor what all you are carrying through security and the airport (including kids and carry on bags) before adding another item to that list. 

If you are checking the car seat, here are some considerations: 

 - Protection: Some airlines bag the car seat. Some just load it as is. In heavy rain, we have had the seats come drenched out for an hour drive and the kids sat on those all the way. If you are flying into some locations (India for us), expect some dirt added to the mix. A car seat bag can help quite a bit (link to the one we use below).

 - Baggage Claim: At some airports, car seats will come out on a different baggage belt along with special items. Just ask at the baggage service desk of your airline if you get your other bags first and not your car seats.   

 - Carrying the Seats: It is usually a short haul from car to check in and baggage to rental car. However with 2 kids and quite a few other bags, we often found ourselves short handed. Kids are usually quite helpful at the beginning of a trip, but quite a handful towards the end of the trip! Again a car seat bag can help with extra straps and even shoulder straps to carry like a backpack. See how it fits in your overall bags and kids carry scheme. What goes on whose shoulder or roller suitcase. 

This is the only carry bag we ever tried. (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01M2A4IK1/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1). Not the best looking one, just a big nylon bag. By the time we decided to get a car seat bag, we just had one infant seat and one booster seat. Both fit into one bag. The sheer size of it looked odd on my back, but it was lightweight with the seats in it. 

A million to fourty five thousand...

Once heard a Planet Money episode that covered how once the big banks took over local banks, in many places black farmers started getting their loan applications rejected or delayed and slowly had to sell their farmland and leave. Farming is a loan heavy activity. You take loans, plant, and pay off after harvest - every year. 

This guardian article covers one farmers overall experience. John Boyd Jr. bought his first farm for $51,000 at age 18 in 1984.. 

"In subsequent visits, the loan officer told Boyd he better learn to talk to him like other black folks did, took naps during meetings, threw Boyd’s applications straight into the trash and spat his chewing tobacco on Boyd’s shirt, claiming to have missed his spittoon."

Year 2019: "To avoid being docked – getting priced down for moisture or debris in the bushels – he will ask his wife, Kara Brewer Boyd, to enlist her white stepfather to sell the beans for him. When the other man takes Boyd’s beans, he’s not docked but complimented."

“The land don’t know color. The land never mistreated me, people do.”

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/apr/29/why-have-americas-black-farmers-disappeared?fbclid=IwAR0JOFwya2W1d8AHDeTeLDDuD1OalnZ-BjS3Tkobt28myKUSekVa7xUCkaw

How things come home...

Remember all the colds we used to catch before this? It's all gone now. Looking back, there used to be only two ways something came home.

 - couple days after a trip, I start feeling something in my throat or nose, becomes a cold, everyone gets it. 

 - one of the kids fall sick first, then everyone gets it. 

No travel, no school, no colds! 

Our small school district has around 7000+ individuals including students and staff. That 7000 could go back directly to anywhere from 14,000 to 35,000 people depending on how many kids from a household are in school, how many grandparents live around here etc. And the population of our city is 40,000. That's how schools connect people! 

 

The 2nd Wave

The initial outbreak in Wuhan was so tightly clamped down that we never got to know how it was managed. But back in June, there were big headlines everywhere about a  a "2nd wave in China".

What happened with that?
Nothing!

This time the information flow was not restricted and we can look back and see what was done. Beijing is a city of 20 million people.

After the initial Wuhan outbreak time lock-downs, cases in Beijing went down to zero. Everything opened back up. They had a 55 day streak with 0 new cases. Then 35 new cases were found on the first day of this outbreak.
 - it was very easy to identify the source - a wholesale sea food market.
 - neighborhoods using the market were put in lock-down.
 - everyone was tested quickly using batch testing (more on batch testing below).
 - based on test results, further targeted lock-downs were imposed while everything else was back open to normal business
 - total cases in this outbreak - 335!

This is one place where fundamental democracy vs. authoritarian styles may come into play. Both USA and India are doing a pretty bad job with virus management. India at least has the ability to perform China style lock-downs, but that definitely will not work in the USA.
 - Both USA and India opened everything back up just as cases were going up in most places and never got under control.
 - We cannot do batch testing in both places because again we never got to the fully controlled state  and positive rates are very high.

Batch testing example: 

 - you take all the samples from an apartment block and do a single test. If negative, move on.

 - if positive, test floor by floor samples in a single test...etc.

The Fake News Cycle

Back in April. Found myself longing for some DD News in the midst of all this COVID coverage overload....and it was exactly like it used to be..20 minutes of what happened on the day, and you are done...well, maybe a little government propaganda mixed in...but you do know it when that happens :)

That kinda got me thinking....We used to read newspapers, which was maybe 8 pages of what happened the previous day and one or two pages of opinion columns. There was enough time to get to know what happened before consciously going to the middle page and reading someone else's opinion, and you knew their background and where they were coming from before you took in that opinion.

Somewhere along the way we went into a 24 hour news and breaking news cycle. And then it became opinion pieces of the person on TV, while the real news slowly disappeared to the scroll at the very bottom. We are told what to believe, and we may or may not happen to read the 'real' news events scrolling below.

And then we went to social media. Now we read our friends and families opinions first, maybe see some opinion pieces on the news, and we never really hear the actual events that happened or take a break to think for ourselves..no touch with reality!!

Wonder what will come next?!

Talking Sense....

What these doctors say are based on their individual experience and probably 100% true. We (both federal and many states) have huge stockpiles of HCQ created at the beginning of the pandemic and there is no restriction on any doctor who believes in it to prescribe it. Things have moved on from initial HCQ days and they have much better outcomes observed with other drugs like Remdesivir and simpler treatment protocols like oxygen for lung issues which have already shown improved survivability in current hospitalized patients. While officially there are no treatment protocols yet (none scientifically proven), CDC points to most current research on this for interim management and it is always updated with new findings. You can go see the actual results from early HCQ trials in NYC and every drug they tried there on the NIH page.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/therapeutic-options.html
https://www.covid19treatmentguidelines.nih.gov/whats-new/

If we step back and look at it there are two very different issues here that I feel we should not mix. The vaccine and The Cure.

1. the vaccine - lots of folk are working on it, it will come some time in the future, hopefully this year, maybe next, worst case 2 years down. I find it best not to worry about it for now. It is a preventative measure. Daily news on vaccine trials and hope do not really help. This will be a big money maker for whoever wins that race.

2. The cure - this has two parts to it. Am summarizing as a very simple average math here - not exact percentages.
part a - about 90/100 folks get better with no intervention.
part b - about 10/100 get hospitalized. Out of the 10, about 9 survive and 1 dies.

For the 10 people hospitalized, we are seeing much better outcomes with current treatment protocols as opposed to initial days (March) where at one point almost every single patient hooked up to a ventilator in both UK and NYC were dying. These protocols will get revised whenever someone tries something new, and enough numbers are behind it to support a recommendation.

Given that 99 out of 100 make a recovery, this is where I believe claims come in. For a doctor seeing patients at clinic, they could be prescribing anything they believe in, and they saw 100 or 500 and there is a good chance all of them recovered. This does not become sceintific basis that the treatment was the cause of the cure. But overall, NIH and others around the world are monitoring the numbers and if there is a statistical significance in a treatment, it will get updated.