Sakura of DOOM

Thank you to everyone for your kind thoughts, sharing experiences with international medical situations, and translation help! The hospital says CB can be discharged this weekend, yay! His facial paralysis has gotten a little worse in the past few days, though the doctors say this can happen. Right now we're trying to figure out how to get him home. Our travel insurance seemed like they might help, but now it sounds like nothing is covered, and the other private air ambulance service wants him to have a hospital bed ready back in California, but that is also proving difficult to get. From what the doctor said yesterday, he is probably okay to fly commercially but would need a medical escort, so we are figuring out how to get that arranged. Fingers crossed...

Wow, a year ago, I was unceremoniously sent home from work in the middle of the day because the entire Bay Area was going to shut down the next day. CB had already been working from home for a few weeks by that point, and stuff in Taiwan actually looked worse than here, so I didn't think everything was going to be better by the end of the shelter in place order in three weeks.

Even so, I was hoping things would be somewhere near normal around summer, and I was really really hoping we wouldn't still be here in a year. And yet here we are.

Some things that have kept me (mostly) sane:
( Read more... )

I very much hope that Biden's goal of July 4th with friends and families pans out.

Happy new year to everyone who celebrates! I always get homesick for Taiwan around new year, but this year is even worse.

I meant to post more during the pandemic, but that clearly did not happen once stuff at work got busier. I will try again! Although I will probably be very bad at answering comments; it takes a lot of the same brain I use for answering work email, and by the time I'm done with that, it's hard to manage to write anything substantial or coherent.

Now I remember why it took me months to crawl through the end of the book even though the middle was extremely interesting!

Part IX is about the longer-term effects of the pandemic. I have to say, reading about the various waves that came after the first two in 1918 didn't make me super optimistic about the future. Barry details how even though the virus mutated so it was milder (but still would have been the most lethal influenza virus known, except compared to its former self), it continued to sweep through communities for at least a year. San Francisco, which had done well in the extremely awful second wave, declared victory and told people they could take off their masks, only to be struck by a third wave. And then there were more recurrences in the early 1920s.

Barry then goes on to more or less blame WWII on the 1918 influenza pandemic. Much like how SARS-CoV2 has had unforeseen complications, the influenza virus didn't just affect the respiratory system. In some cases, it seemed to do something to the brain. Unfortunately, Woodrow Wilson came down with it (although some accounts say it was a minor stroke) during the Paris Peace Conference as everyone was negotiating the Treaty of Versailles. Wilson, who was apparently all for non-vindictive measures previously, caved to France and England's more punitive demands, and Barry draws a line from Wilson's mental instability due to his bout with the flu to the treaty terms to the eventual rise of the Third Reich. (I, on the other hand, am sure the virus played a role but wasn't the only factor.)

( In which I am annoyed )

Despite the frustration, still worth reading, particularly the bits directly concerned with the pandemic. You can probably skip anything before and after. In the afterword, Barry talks about how we might prepare for another influenza pandemic, which is what most infectious disease people were most afraid of. I guess a coronavirus upended expectations, but it pretty much has all the traits that made people so afraid of another influenza pandemic—extremely contagious and lethal enough to shut down society. Thank goodness it's not quite as lethal and that it doesn't mutate as much, but still. All Barry's notes about preparation and not lying to the public are great, and I can see why people in the George W. Bush administration read it when trying to prepare for a biological attack. It's too bad none of it seemed to stick.

- rachelmanija's post for Parts VIII-IX

This got much more interesting once Barry stopped talking about assorted scientists with very little context and finally starting providing actual context for the 1918 pandemic!

Part II, The Swarm, covers viruses in general and how they work, and the influenza virus in particular. The H and N in the various influenza virus names (H1N1, H5N1, etc.) are hemagglutinin and neuraminidase, the two antigens on the virus. They occur in a ton of different shapes, each with subtypes, and the influenza virus also mutates extremely quickly because it's an RNA virus. (The RNA means there is less double-checking than there would be if it used DNA to replicate itself.) Influenza viruses originate in birds, and they probably migrate to humans via intermediary animals like pigs. One theory is that pigs have some receptors that can bind to bird or human viruses, so they can be infected by both, and the viruses mix their parts together.

If you can't tell, I found this part much, much more interesting than the assortment of scientists from Part I. I did, however, want to know if you are immune to all H1N1 influenza types if you have gotten one. It sounded like even after the numbering of the Hs and the Ns, there were still subtypes, but I couldn't tell how distinct those subtypes were, or if the main difference was in which shape of H and N the virus has.

In "The Tinderbox," Barry gives an overview of the US's entrance into World War I and how it mobilized various civilians, medical experts, and etc. Herein Welch reenters the picture, although I still can't quite say what he did. It's particularly weird that Barry emphasizes all these great scientists, because I feel in a later part, he basically has to detail how they all go down the wrong path when trying to research influenza. The poor nurses only get a paragraph or two, and they get blamed for a shortage in nurses because they consistently refused to let some of the doctors enlist "practical nurses," who would have less training than "graduate nurses."

I feel there is a whole book here on doctors vs. nurses and the status and respect (or lack thereof) given to nurses, but clearly Barry is not interested. Boo.

There's also a lot about censorship in the name of the war effort, which will come into play later when the pandemic kicks off.

- rachelmanija's review of Parts II and III

I am not sure anyone else is interested, but Rachel and I are doing Pandemic Book Club! Come join if you are interested as well!

To give you a sense of my brain, I actually read 2/3 of The Great Influenza several months prior to the coronavirus and also listen to podcasts like This Podcast Will Kill You for fun.

Anyway! On to Part I: The Warriors!

I remembered that this book got off to a slow start, and I stand by that judgment. Barry opens with an attention-getting prologue, describing one scientist's encounter with people struck down by the 1918 influenza, particularly emphasizing how deadly it was in young people, and how people would be so short of breath that they would literally turn blue or even close to black due to lack of oxygen.

...and then he goes back to the founding of Johns Hopkins. And then to establish the importance of Johns Hopkins, he basically ends up retelling the history of Western medicine from Galen and the four humors. Which I kind of knew about? And it's a bit of a distraction from Johns Hopkins, as I feel you could establish its importance by just noting that it was the first medical research institution in the US at a time when American medical schools basically granted anyone who could pay a medical degree and germ theory was not the widely accepted consensus.

...and then he goes on to talk about several notable scientists, none of whose names I can remember, even though I have actually read 2/3 of the book. As Rachel notes, Barry has a giant crush on William Welch, one of the founders at Johns Hopkins, but mostly goes on to talk about the scientific accomplishments of Welch's students. I get that he is trying to establish Welch as the connecting factor, but given that Barry himself notes that Welch did not have the concentration to pursue significant scientific questions, it feels very disjointed.

I feel this section would have been much more interesting if I had some sense of who all the people were in terms of the 1918 pandemic. I think Barry establishes that a bit later on, but I did get to some of the book that discusses how the pandemic influenced medical science in America, and it's still hard drawing the connections with the people in this section of the book.

Anyway, the pandemic is next! That should be much more interesting.

- rachelmanija's review of Part I

1. Was in Berkeley for a conference, and it was nice to be around campus again!

2. Had braised meat rice for lunch, then got pastries from the Chinese bakery and pearl milk tea, yum. And the lunch place was playing Cpop and made me slightly homesick for Taiwan.

3. Watched The Snake Prince, a Shaw Brothers movie, with CB and jhameia and it is... quite a thing. Let's just say there was much more disco music and dancing than I had expected.

Thinking of putting together a playlist for the Wiscon Vid Party on morally ambiguous and ambitious women. Anyone have recs for vids or AMVs that showcase power-hungry women? POC characters or characters from games or anime preferred. I'd especially love something on Kuvira from Legend of Korra, Lady Eboshi from Princess Mononoke or Kushana from Nausicaa.

Also, I am feeling old... where does one go to look for vids nowadays? I did find a fair amount of Kuvira vids on YouTube, but nothing I liked so far, and animemusicvideos.org's search is incredibly frustrating.

Currently on the list: feedingonwind's A New Day (Mariah, Luke Cage), shati's Hope on Fire (Mishil, Queen Seondeok), starlady's Shuang Nu (Wu Zetian, Detective Dee).

This is John Lewis' memoir of his time in SNCC during the Civil Rights Movement, co-written with Andrew Aydin and illustrated by Nate Powell.

It begins with Lewis preparing for the 2009 inauguration, and the contrast between that and the 1960s Jim Crow era was probably much more uplifting just a few months ago. As things are today, the book feels more necessary than ever. It's not as though the work stopped after the Voting Rights Act, after Obama's election, after anything, but there is so much more of it now.

Part of me wishes I had at least one experience of reading this before the election, with Obama still president, because those flashes to his inauguration in the comic, the hope that is so tangible, all of it is painful to read now.

I've known the general story of the Civil Rights Movement for almost as long as I can remember, having grown up reading those Scholastic biographies of Martin Luther King, Jr. And I've learned much more about it later on, from how much community organization was going on to the many different groups and philosophies involved. That said, I found this comic to be a valuable addition, particularly the first-person narrative and the way the black-and-white illustrations grab you.

The three volumes cover all the big points up through the signing of the Voting Rights Act, from the lunch counter sit-ins to the bus boycotts to Freedom Summer and Selma and the March on Washington, but it's the little details within the big moments that make the comic so good. Ones that particularly struck me were the students who couldn't make it through the nonviolence training or the fear of being killed—I feel it's always so easy for people to say, "If I were there, I would have marched or protested or volunteered," but to be honest, I'm not sure I would have been brave enough, particularly as a college student. The stories of all the people who were killed while helping are pretty chilling, and I'm glad that the authors and artist make it very clear how dangerous it was and how the activists there didn't know if they would make it through or not.

Other moments: one of the people running the lunch counters shutting it down and fumigating it with the protesters still inside; the ways people still resisted even while they were in jail; how the activists set up check ins; and through it all, just how violent the pushback was to every single tiny step. I keep returning to that after reading all the justifications for police violence on the protesters today and how quickly just saying "no" becomes a reason to beat you down. It's not that I didn't know, but seeing it illustrated brings it home in a very particular way.

My one complaint is that I wish Lewis had gone more into how the movement started to splinter, how some people began to advocate for physically fighting back, or the increasing divide between SNCC and the SCLC and other organizations. Lewis hews to his nonviolent philosophy here while also trying to portray other people's points of view without demonizing them. I think his attempt to walk the line of upholding nonviolent resistance without condemning those who thought he sold out makes those parts a little too abstract; without the dialogue and arguments and examples of what happened in those clashes of philosophy, much of the power of the comic is lost.

I also wish he had gone into more detail because I would have found it extremely helpful for right now, when it feels like there's a different answer or strategy every day, and as a roadmap for making change with a large coalition of groups who frequently don't see eye to eye.

All in all, very worth reading, and I only wish it were longer and had more details about how to deal with splintering coalitions.

Does anyone know if any California representatives or the governor were at SFO today? I think I saw Scott Weiner but as of the last time I checked, didn't see any statement or anything from Jerry Brown.