Warranting a couple updates and follow ups this week…

Marburg

The Marburg outbreak is in its waning days. Of 158 known contacts of the most recent cases, 118 had finished the 21 day incubation period without getting Marburg last week, and most of the rest will close out this week. So an odd little flare up of Marburg to be sure, but apparently contained with only a handful of infections in July.

Monkeypox

Only news of note here is that quietly… very quietly… new cases in the US have essentially leveled off in the last two weeks. Before you @ me with “testing availability!” caveats, the CDC has started to publish laboratory data surveys as well, and the trend confirms there. Granted, the lab data is smidge behind the case reporting data, but you have a general increase in the percentage of specimens tested, but the positivity rate in those tested specimens is steady to falling. This -suggests- we may be at the epidemiologic high point of the current wave in the US. Hopefully this leveling off is confirmed this week, and then we may actually expect to see a tapering within the next month.

As to if there will be follow on waves of monkeypox, that is a little more difficult to project. Travel restrictions have eased, and certainly a re-infusion of monkeypox is possible, maybe even enough to kick off knock on waves. True epidemics and pandemics do show wave patterns, and I am still definitely feeling a little torched by SARS-CoV-2 in the early days, when I posited that its mutation rate was insufficiently high to generate the number of waves we have seen since. Once bitten, twice shy I suppose. I will say that historically, however, monkeypox outbreaks have done this kind of pattern–propogate for a bit, and then the gravity from the biological facts that we are not its ideal host and it is not coronavirus-level contagious exert their pull and the epidemic collapses and disappears after a few generations of spread within close contact communities. But this current outbreak has already gone a bit further than your average monkeypox outbreak of the past, so some bets may be off. We’ll just have to see how things develop through the end of the year.

Regardless, apocalypse -may- be averted for the time being.

Coronavirus

–Around the horn, cases are falling pretty much everywhere but China, even per official numbers there. Since there is still a zero COVID policy there, these entail new restrictions every time they pop up. That being said, you can absolutely still catch COVID these days. I have heard from a couple readers in the last couple weeks who popped positive with cold like symptoms. Anecdotally, paxlovid continues to get rave reviews, with rapid relief of symptoms and the monoclonal antibodies appear increasingly restricted to those whose COVID is severe enough to consider hospitalization–likely because you need an infusion anyways to get the antibodies. Again, if you are high risk for severe COVID and pop positive, definitely talk to your doctor about available treatments.

Speaking of paxlovid, the FDA has requested that Pfizer run a study by September of next year on giving patients with “rebound” COVID after the first course of paxlovid a second course to see if that controls those symptoms. Supposedly, they are close to finalizing the protocol and seem likely to be enrolling that study by year’s end.

I would expect at least this constant low activity to continue. Southern hemisphere bellweathers like South Africa remain very promising. The news has been noticeable for the -absence- of new scare headlines of rapidly rising cases and new variants, so there remains a distinct, if not rising, possibility that BA.4 and BA.5 were the fall wave come early. We shall see in the next couple months.

–Of course the other big news in the last couple weeks as the CDC “streamlining” COVID guidance. You can read the full release here, but the highlights are as follows, and importantly, apply independent of vaccination status:

1. You no longer need to quarantine if you are a known exposure to someone else who is positive, but the CDC recommends you wear a mask for 10 days and test on day 5.
2. If you are COVID positive, isolate for at least 5 days. If you no longer have symptoms by day 5, you can end your isolation, as CDC now believes you are most infectious to others within those first 5 days. If symptoms come back, of course re-isolate. Other common sense advice is, if you have tested positive, stay away from those highly likely to get severe COVID until at least day 11, to minimize the risk you might pose to them.
3. If you had moderate or severe COVID, isolate for 10 days. (your time in the hospital will count towards that)
4. “Recommending screening testing of asymptomatic people without known exposures will no longer be recommended in most community settings.” Not a good use of these assays, huh? Do tell…

Anyways, if a LOT of that sounds very familiar to our readers, well, it should. For example, we have covered how the chances of transmitting COVID to others drops like a rock once symptoms end based on publications that have been out for a year or more now. Halting the screening of the asymptomatic should also sound very, very familiar.

When they said the proverbial gears grind slowly, apparently, they really, really meant that…

Socioeconomic

–In what I am sure is totally, completely unrelated news, the director of the CDC, to her enormous credit (and we mean that) announced in the past week that the CDC was too slow to respond to changing science, was inconsistent and poor in its messaging, too slow and secretive with its data release and allowed political influence to weigh too heavily on its own scientists and statements. She has announced an ambitious ground up restructuring of the CDC to ensure that its performance in the next pandemic is not quite as pitiable as a number of very important elements of the CDC’s response have been. A little more quietly, but also perhaps a more tacit admission, the NIH has ended the subaward for coronavirus research with the Wuhan virology institute.

We have mentioned before that the bonfire of the credibilities has rightly and justifiably included as fuel a number of major institutions, and that while they need not be swept away, newer forms that actually work as intended and as we want them too will be a needed consequence in a post-pandemic world.

The CDC is the first among several, if not many. And of course, much depends on how the reorganization is conducted, achieved, and towards what actual goals. We wish Dr. Walensky the very best in what will be a truly heroic effort.

–Now let’s do social media, journalism/traditional media, multiple political and transnational institutions, and how we select for our business/political/institutional leaders in general.. just to tick off a few from the top of my head…

–Related thought piece:

“I mean merely that institutions all but inevitably evolve into those configurations–structural, ideological, ethical, emotional–that best fortify their power, influence and stability. And fear is a majestically potent instrument.”

“If I were to take an even more expansively cynical view of the matter, I would add that the work of ‘civilizing’ barbaric populations has always been advanced in part–especially among those persons or peoples whom the patrician classes regard as temperamentally recalcitrant or intellectually feeble–by searing consciences into intractable natures through the regular application of the cautery of terror.”

That is Dr. David Bentley Hart, writing in “That All Shall Be Saved”. These quotes are, in their context in that book, on the church in Western Europe in the Middle Ages, but something about the fit of shoes and wearing them…

–Finally, I have no doubt you are following headlines on the continued crisis in food and energy prices. Parabolic spikes in the cost of LNG are leaving countries like Pakistan essentially unable to get any, with protests in the streets now following black outs running from 8-16 hours a day. Every day has brought the announced closure or slowdown of major European chemical manufacturers, including those making fertilizer. Japan, despite the recent memory of Fukishima, announced this week that it will build more nuclear capability as green way to ensure adequate energy supply for the future. Germany, on the other hand, continues to rule it out–but they are a wealthy enough nation to afford wood chips and natural gas, one supposes.

Well, wealthy enough now. We’ll see what these prices do if sustained a few more years.

Meanwhile, you have had droughts in essentially every major agricultural center this year. West of the Mississippi in the US will see corn and soybean yields pressured, although here in Indiana, things have not been quite as bad. There have been headlines warning of potential tomato shortages in the US, as California’s growing region (60% of the US crop) has been pressured by the continued general Western drought. In Europe, the “hunger stones” have been appearing in rivers like the Danube as water levels fall to where Medieval graffiti artists chiseled into rocks that you’re basically agriculturally screwed if you see this message. In the Horn of Africa, a multi-year drought is coming at the worst time for what are essentially huge numbers of subsistence farmers. Even China has not been spared, as record heat have led to energy cut backs impacting industry and drying up rivers. Their major rice growing regions have been hit, with yields expected to be on the low side.

Again, particularly in North America, you are not yet talking crop failure. But there is not an obvious major growing region that is doing well enough to take up the expected slack. Food prices are likely to remain quite high, with serious risk of starvation across the globe, and with it, political un rest. End of this year, certainly next could get very dicey. Also strongly calls into question the decision of the Netherlands and Canada to try to restrict fertilizer use, which seems to be coming at literally the worst possible time.

Regardless, if you have been blessed with the means, think of your neighbors and donations to offset what is likely to be serious hunger pressure this year and through the spring, at a minimum.

–I think that the weather will not, in all likelihood, be simultaneously bad in all the major growing reasons forever. I think this year will be rough, for sure. Next year, let’s see. What I worry much more about on average is the apparent pocket we have hit in the reliable supply at a predictable price in energy availability. It is difficult to get coal/oil/natural gas drillers and refiners to commit the billions of dollars of additional drilling or expansion of refining capacity, which will not recoup those costs for 5-10 years, when they are being told that world will, come hell or high water (perhaps more literally than intended), consume less of those products by the end of that same time span. Asking them to commit themselves to their own future bankruptcy seems unlikely to receive their support. Meanwhile, just getting to what is on hand available is problematic still. Because there is less available energy on hand now, I suspect you are still getting “missing widget” scenarios, where for want of a gallon of diesel a nail was not delivered someplace where it was needed, so as the old saying goes, a shoe was not put on a horse so the cavalry had one fewer rider so the battle was lost so the kingdom fell. Similarly, for want of that nail, the sand for a fracked well in Oklahoma did not show up on time, and the delay in those barrels to market meant some silver was not mined this quarter, so there wasn’t any for the solar panels to be made, so now they won’t show up until next year. And so on and so on. The still rippling effects of COVID shutdowns coupled with energy flow supply and on time demand disruption.

So between that and the Russian-Ukraine war, with I think reasonable expectation that Russian oil and gas supply to the market will fall into the future (they cannot sustain their infrastructure, and who trusts Putin now to help them with that?), you have the present air pocket of constricted supply. To replace all that energy generation with solar, or wind, or hydro, or even nuclear, takes time. It takes time to build the panels, the turbines, the plants for those–and the parts for all them require a lot of oil and LNG in the present to mine and manufacture.

So you have a lot of friction between the total energy available to the global system right now, its predictability in both price AND supply, and the demand of a globalized modern economy that runs on the fundamental assumptions that a certain amount of total energy is available, for predictable delivery, at predictable prices.

Those assumptions are under fire, and we have discussed the consequences of that before.

I wonder if the headlines you see now, that causes so many of us to worry, may be not say aloud, that things are perhaps beginning to unravel, or at real risk unraveling catastrophically. And that impending sense of doom is adding to that pervasive malaise we keep feeling and discussing.

–Is it that bad though, or is the high financial reward for attention driving more hyperbolic and click-baity headlines and stories amplifying a problematic, but ultimately still fixable situation?

Is the sky really falling on us, Chicken Little?

Let’s compare to previous historical global challenges…

A long time ago, pressure, unimaginable pressure, had been building for centuries, if not millennia. Until the pressure could build no more, and even the rocks of the ages could contain the forces roiling within and underneath them.

To this day, we don’t know exactly when it happened. We’re not even quite sure where.

But sometime in either late 535 or early 536 AD, one of the most sudden and violent volcanic eruptions in the history of mankind took place. Indeed, the reason we don’t know the when or where is because anyone who was nearby whichever volcano blew (and there are a few candidates) who was not fortunate enough to die in the initial event was immediately back in the stone ages and not recording much for awhile.

We only know about it by the recorded histories of multiple peoples, many of them not in contact with each other yet. This gave the accidental benefit of independently recorded events, across multiple continents. In Constantinople, Eastern Roman Empire scribes recorded that the seasons “seemed jumbled”, and the sun “bluish” and without heat from the volcanic dust cloud that circled the globe. Summer came without heat, spring without a warming from the winter cold, and winter without the storms that bring needed rain for the growing season there. Frost ruined harvests. In Ireland, the Annals of Ulster recorded a “failure of bread” in 536. Chinese sources reported snow in August. A dense dry fog was mentioned from Europe through the Middle East to China. Drought hit Peru.

All sources, to a one, describe widespread crop failures and famine, across the entire globe. Modern tree ring analysis has shown that trees in 536 across the world show reduced gain that year, consistent with a massive loss of energy from the sun and nutrient stress. Some historians have called 536 AD “the worst year to be alive” in history.

But it was only a year. By 539, the world was warming, crops growing again, and nations recovering their footing in the gradual thaw of a volcanic winter.

Only for another volcano to similarly, violently, erupt and plunge the world again into what has been called the “Late Antique Little Ice Age.” It was the most rapid fall in global temperature in the last 2,000 years. This was accompanied in the West by the Plague of Justinian, which raced through famine weakened immune systems.

In short, a bad time was had by pretty much all.

However, these were all a series of exogenous shocks. Volcanoes and plague are fairly random external events, and stressed civilizations significantly across the globe. However, they did not fall. There were some mass migrations, for sure. But the main empires around the world at the time carried on–as did humanity as a whole.

I would argue that with our technology, our global connectedness, our greater wealth of resources, knowledge and a much larger human population creating a greater pool of human capital to draw on, our society is in much better shape than those early “Dark Age” societies of 536-541 AD to survive even serial exogenous shocks as severe as they faced. We’re in space, fergodsakes. We have telescopes floating in the solar system taking pictures of stars billions of years in the past, as the light just now reaches those telescopes.

SARS-CoV-2 was an exogenous shock, to be sure. Even in the grand scheme of global pandemics, though, it was not a Black Death, and we not only vaccinated the hell out of it, we have multiple effective treatments available, globally, in record time.

I would argue now that the chief problem of our time is us. We are not only consistent, we are committed to kicking the ball into our own net, over and over again. To the point of fueling conspiracy theories (with varying degrees of credibility) that this is a deliberate plot for a managed implosion of modern society, all founded on the idea that –no one– can be this reliably self-catastrophic by accident.

The basic counter argument is that the long tale of human history is that no, humans can actually be remarkably vain, disconnected from reality, near term focused, unwilling to sacrifice personally for greater long term goals, and yes, that outright stupid and incompetent. That’s all very possible and has happened before–over and over again.

Everything from pandemic responses creating global supply chain issues that we could somehow could not anticipate nor mitigate effectively, in co-ordinated response, to now roiling effects on our available energy now spilling into our ability to grow and distribute enough food, are all, all self-inflicted.

In theory, that makes them fixable. An easy start would be to stop making things worse for ourselves, as we seem to be trying to do with energy and agricultural policies the world over. Simply ensuring that the amount of available energy remains constant, and deliverable, at predictable cost, even while we try to adjust the sources of that energy would be an enormous positive improvement to the current situation. Just that much–stabilizing energy supply and price–would go a long way towards solving many of our most immediate challenges.

The challenge of this decade will not be how to handle the volcanic eruption or the pandemic. The problems now are of our own creation. It is whether we can reform our institutions, ablaze on the bonfire of credibility, quickly enough to maintain our fundamental freedoms, and make the timely, effective decisions we need to get out of our own way.

The CDC has had the introspection and courage to take the first step, but there are many more and larger out there.

Keep fighting the spiritual malaise. Keep up your courage. If they could survive catastrophic, literal force of nature disasters in 536 AD, what we are largely doing to ourselves is a straight forward fix by comparison. Recognize the hole–and first, quit digging.

–Your chances of catching Marburg are equivalent to the chances of the 536 AD volcano eruption happening again tomorrow; your chances of catching monkeypox are equivalent to ANY volcano erupting tomorrow (just kidding–there’s about 20 a day going off somewhere around the world, most of them just leaking lava or gas like your average Hawaiian volcano); and your chances of catching coronavirus are equivalent to the chances that there are, indeed, universals binding us, if we pause to remember them.

<Paladin>