The fact that you can't even make out on a bench in Central Park without someone recording you on their iPhone and then posting it to social media as some kind of bit is everything that's wrong with society and I am not joking. The surveillance state (administered by an actual state or by the millions of people with phones who want to embarrass people on their TL) is essentially the least romantic thing imaginable in both the love sense and the living sense. It is anti-romantic and anti-life. Part of the reason why the before world was fun was the fact that you didn't have this kind of thing. The ability to do something without it being documented and recorded is the difference between being free vs an animal locked in a cage. There is a direct correlation between everyone constantly being afraid that someone is going to record them and post it somewhere and society becoming more neurotic, less fun, more boring, and less alive.
The self-administered surveillance state is the enemy of life.
Always think World Cups are so beautiful for associative memory. They come every four years, allow you to reflect on life, how far you have come, where you were when it last came and just an opportunity to somehow be grateful for everything.
Three people just died of hantavirus on a Dutch cruise ship. The strain kills nearly 40% of the people it infects. And yet no virologist on earth is panicking about a pandemic, because the reason it stays small is one of the strangest rules in disease science.
The rule is simple. The deadlier a virus is, the harder it is to spread.
If a virus kills you in days, you can't ride a bus, board a plane, or even leave the hospital. You're in a bed or a body bag. Either way, the virus killed its only ride.
Hantavirus has been around for at least 70 years, but fewer than 1,000 Americans have ever caught it. The CDC says it kills 38% of those who do. The cruise ship strain, called Andes, kills closer to 40%. If hantavirus spread like COVID, it would kill billions. But it can't.
Most hantaviruses spread only one way. You breathe in tiny dust particles from rat or mouse pee, droppings, or spit. No mice in your house, no virus. The cruise ship is the rare exception, because the Andes strain can spread between people, but it usually needs close contact like spouses sharing a bed. A Johns Hopkins virologist called Andes spread "unbelievably rare."
Compare it to the viruses that scared the world. Ebola kills 60 to 90% of people, but only through bodily fluids and only late in the illness, so each patient passes it to fewer than 2 others. SARS killed 10% before being wiped out in 8 months. MERS killed 35% but never spread far beyond the Middle East. None of them became pandemics, because the spread was always too slow.
Then COVID showed up. It killed about 1 in every 100 people who caught it. That is almost nothing compared to hantavirus. But COVID was mild enough that you could work for a week without knowing. You would ride the bus, hug your kid, eat lunch with a coworker, and infect four other people. It killed 7 million.
Flu works the same way. Mild fever, sore throat, but you still drag yourself to school or the office. The virus walks right into the next host.
Hantavirus is the opposite. Within 4 to 10 days, your lungs fill with fluid. There's no medicine that fights it and no vaccine to prevent it. The only treatment is a machine that breathes for you, and even that just cuts the death rate from 50% to 20%. Every outbreak, from 3,200 UN soldiers in the Korean War, to the 1993 Four Corners cases, to Gene Hackman's wife Betsy Arakawa last year, traces back to mice.
The viruses that worry scientists are the boring ones. The ones that give you a sniffle for a week and let you walk around the city while you're contagious. Hantavirus, brutal as it is, never had the spread to do real damage.
Están citando a 50 personas por el tema de la CIA y a nadie por el tema de Rubén Rocha Moya y los otros 9 acusados. Así como tampoco citaron a Adán Augusto López por La Barredora o a Ignacio Ovalle por Segalmex o a Cienfuegos por Ayotzinapa. Estado de derecho a modo, solo cuando conviene.
Sheinbaum's top priority has been to consolidate a one-party state inside Mexico. She has willingly sacrificed other aspects of Mexican nationhood to gain scope and space for her anti-democratic domestic agenda. I wrote about her tendency in @TheAtlantic https://t.co/x9NPhMcGfr
@marcelo21059021@yosoytupadelofi Creo que su ranking ya no depende mucho de si misma pues individualmente... ya está demostrando su potencial y, para pegar el salto al top, necesita resultados que no veo alcanzables con su actual pareja