The Sun & the Rain

First day of work in the US back in 2004, the receptionist greeted me with 'Good Morning, looks like you brought the sun with you!' and all my confused self could think was 'That doesn't sound good, but she definitely does not look upset either'!! 

Lots of songs still remind me of that day and confusion. 

While an English song goes 'You are my sunshine....' 

a Tamil song goes 'Un azhagaale en veyil kaalam ini mazhai kaalam...' (rough translation: thanks to your beauty my sunny days are now rainy ones...)

😅

The Phone Stress

My older one in 6th grade - they had a small class project. Design something, get it made, and then come up with an advertising for it and present in class. 4 kids  in the team. They designed it, got it 3d printed at school and had a skit ready for the advertisement before heading home for the weekend. 

Three of the girls have phones. The three are texting each other during the weekend about this project. By Saturday afternoon, they realize that none of them have the printed artefact. Is it with the 4th person? How do we contact her?  .....

By Sunday morning we are in panic mode. What is our backup? Plans discussed...alternate plans made...there was a Plan C and even a Plan D.....I had to cut some wood and make something that looked roughly like a bottle. Had to take the kid to a craft store and get some wood paint.....Am guessing the other two parents were also helping out with their backup plans...

Next update was Monday evening...'oh...we found it in the classroom...we will use it tomorrow for our skit...!' 

The girl without the phone and her folks had a pretty peaceful weekend am guessing....

:) 

Minding their Business

News reports on business channels are always very focused on their business. 

Mainstream: "Russia has a 100 THOUSAND troops ready to go!!!" 

Business: "should we be more worried about inflation or Russia today?"

So are kids. Back when USA gave that submarine deal to Australia, and France was PISSED at the USA for torpedoing their deal with Australia:

Mainstream: "France recalls US ambassador, this is the MOST SIGNIFICANT peacetime warning a country can give another!!"

Our kids: "does this mean there won't be any more Macarons at Costco?" 

Electric Gas Stations

 Another day, another TV reporter talking about electric cars. It’s usually the same pattern. Go in a couple cars, marvel at the technology, exclaim how smooth the ride is or how fast it accelerates and then go to a charging station and lament how slow it fills up. Then compare the number of gas stations to the charging network. 

They usually skip the one crucial factor: everyone who has a house essentially has a ‘gas station’ at home and are leaving the house with a full tank every morning! So we don’t need an equivalent network of charging stations!

Open or Close

 

(Personal opinion - have not cross checked this with actual data)

The last school year started after the first wave. 

Some places started with schools open with a virtual option, some started with a virtual only option. 

Places with schools that started virtual saw a lot of debates on the best time to open, teacher and kid vaccinations etc. Then the second wave hit and most decided to wait it out. Most ended the year with majority of kids in virtual classes. 

Places with schools that started open saw more kids return to in person classes throughout the school year, even through the second wave, and ended the year with most kids attending school. 

Clotty matters!

Through all the AstraZeneca vaccine clot pauses and mess, I heard the numbers being compared to lightning strikes and shark attacks to show how rare it was. Covid is known to cause blood clots. Never saw numbers being compared to covid clot count. Was searching for data and it is hard to come by. While vaccine side effects are rigorously monitored, actual disease stats do not seem to be. The only study I could find was this from UC San Diego (https://health.ucsd.edu/news/releases/Pages/2020-11-23-study-covid-19-infection-combined-with-blood-clots-worsen-patient-outcomes.aspx) which was on 8000 patients. This is miniscule compared to the millions of points of data we have on the vaccine. 

Anyway, listing all the data points I could find to compare numbers here. Please do message back with criticism / comments / more data. 

From UC San Diego Study: 

Blood clot in Covid patients: 1 in 5

Blood clot in severe Covid cases: 1 in 3

From UK Astra Zeneca Numbers (https://cosmosmagazine.com/health/medicine/covid-19-vaccination-and-blood-clots-by-the-numbers/): 

Blood clots reported- 79 in 20 million: 1 in 253,000

Deaths reported - 19 in 20 million: 1 in 1,052,631

How do we compare those numbers now? 

From CDC website: Deaths from blood clots annually in the USA: 60,000 to 100,000

Taking 80,000, this is approximately 1 in 4,375 people die every year due to blood clots (irrespective of COVID or vaccines)

Now if you take the covid death rate of 1 in 100 (before vaccinations started)

and use that with 1 in 3 severe cases have clots from UCSD study, 

Chance of death from Clot in Covid of around 1 in 300. 

So final numbers from above: 

Chance of dying from blood clots for a normal human: 1 in 4,375

Chance of dying from blood clots due to covid: 1 in 300

Chance of dying from blood clots after getting AZ Vaccine: 1 in 1,052,631

Navigating Fox News

Did a lot of nyt.com and foxnews.com during the elections. NYT’s deceptions are subtle, usually with the data. Sometimes the chart timeline is specifically cut to prove their point, sometimes Y axis is exaggerated to show the inflection points. 

Foxnews.com on the other hand is the opposite. Typically the main page will have an explosive headline, featuring AOC, Pelosi or anyone to catch the reader. (one example that got me to click before inauguration was - 'Pelosi made national guard sleep on the Capitol floor'), then you click in and read the actual (and very factual I must say here) article (this will have the details of NG sleeping on the floor, had nothing to do with Pelosi) and if required at the very end a kind of legal captcha. 

This video (https://youtu.be/nA-10vPcA-4) is a screengrab taken on November 19. 

1. Main page headline - Giuliani detailing election fraud.

2. Click through and article headline is different - Trump campaign is dropping the lawsuit - that was what Giuliani said in that press conference

3. Read through what was said in that conference (and a lot of hook ads) and get to last two paragraphs where they put the legal captcha - ‘Trump lost MI by 155k votes & nobody has found any evidence of election fraud’

🙂

Green New Everything Deal

One habit I've tried to carry on from the 2020 elections is to look everything up at the source where data is available. Pretty much all election count information and details were posted on the respective county websites. 

The Green New Deal - have been hearing about it for ever. Had an idea it is about addressing climate change, probably by some extreme measures. Never gave much attention to it given everyone dismissing it as far left and will never pass. 

The congress website has all these and you can read the green new deal as introduced HR109 here: https://www.congress.gov/116/bills/hres109/BILLS-116hres109ih.pdf

I do see why so many folks are opposed to it. The bill covers the damage climate change causes and goes about setting goals to address this. But then, it also reads like a bucket list of everything else that was ever on the table which may or may not have anything to do with climate change. Just pasting a few from the bill: 

 - ensure prosperity and economic security for all people of the US

 - promote justice and equity

 - repair historic oppression of indigenous people......etc.

 - cleaning up hazardous waste sites

 - guarantee a job with a family sustaining wage

 - strengthen and protect the right of all workers to organize unionize and....

 - strengthen workplace health safety anti discrimination....

 - provide high quality healthcare for all people of the US

 - affordable housing

 - economic security

So is this something cleverly devised to call me a climate denier or an actual plan to fight climate change? 

    

Mask Mandate!

After losing my Dubai Malayalam radio station on TuneIn, I recently started listening to Radio Malayalam 98.6FM from Qatar. Heard them go "Remember to wear your masks. We still have the 200,000 Fine and 3 year prison term in effect". 

So obviously googled it up and found a press release on 17 May 2020 with the $55,000 fine and 3 year jail term. 

And the next thing I thought was how did COVID do in Qatar. And I really do not have to say anything about this next chart and what happened to it in June 2020 :) 

Persistence!

Our 6 y/o: Can I play on the iPad please?

Mom: No

6yo: Let me know when you change your mind

Mom: I am not planning to change my mind. 

6yo: Well, you can always change your plans! 

Vaccine News

 Vaccine news: it started with the trials and things that went wrong...and once vaccinations started, it switched to who is refusing to get vaccinated, who got an adverse reaction...new strains...etc.

More than 68 million vaccine doses have been administered in the United States so far and the count of vaccinated people who got hospitalized for / who died of COVID-19 is ZERO!

It has been 100% effective at preventing serious illness and death.

Am sure whenever the first vaccinated patient is hospitalized, the news will be there, having a field day with it...till then they will try their best to stay away from that one stat that really matters

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. 

Gajar ka Halwa & Malpua

Gajar ka Halwa was a big disappointment in my life! Growing up, you see in almost every Hindi movie the Maa tell her Beta that she has made Gajar ka Halwa. And suddenly the entire atmosphere of that scene changes from one of confrontation to peace...or sadness to bliss or something along those lines...

Now this is not today's day where you could just go out, find a restaurant who made a North Indian dessert, and try it out. Even something as basic as wheat was just starting to make it's first appearance into South India and folks where experimenting with their first chapatis.

So finally on my first trip out during college, I did try this miracle dessert. And it was disappointing....don't get me wrong...it was not bad at all to taste...but it wasn't the magical elixir I expected from watching all those movies....!!

Anyway...now that am obsessed with this 'aaj se teri...' song from Pad Man, am starting to sense a similar feeling about a Malpua. Never heard of it before. But it seems to be able to right every wrong as long as "Bas mere liye tu maalpuve....Kabhi kabhi bana dena...."

Good People!

I think you and I, we belong to the 'good people' category. We are mostly happy, but then we get mad once in a while at folks we know and folks we don't (commute anyone?)and we get the blues once in a while....

Look at the breakup of gun related deaths and you can see how having easy access to a gun while one is at the height of one of those emotional rides pans out.

Suicide tops, followed by homicide of someone you know.

Am totally cool with that. These are personal choices. This is a free country.

HOWEVER....

Fact 1: 18% of Americans have reported some sort of mental illness.
Fact 2: There are 3 million plus public school teachers in this country.

Now if someone is thinking about arming 3 million people locked every day in a classroom full of kids that are not even theirs, I have to call BULL on that!