Testing for the corona virus: my experience

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I returned with my wife by air from Florida, coughing a bit and feeling unwell and having sat next to an oriental gentleman who boarded the plane wearing an elaborate mask – then took it off ( I have no evidence that he was sick, but it spooked me nonetheless).

Two days later I was due to attend physical therapy at the local hospital.  On entering the hospital I was greeted by a member of staff.  Spontaneously, without thinking (but feeling weak, disoriented and generally lousy)  I asked whether the hospital was now testing for the corona virus.  Better safe than sorry, I thought, but realizing It could be a total red herring.   The staff member personally accompanied me to the appropriate department, where I was seen by a doctor ten minutes later.

After about 15 minutes a nurse then came in and inserted a probe up my nostrils as far as it would go, twice.  I was very painful and unexpected. She told me she needed samples, one for pneumonia and influenza (results almost immediate), and the second for the corona virus.  The nurse told me that everyone cried out – the quick procedure is very uncomfortable.

Later that afternoon the doctor herself phoned me at home to say I was clear of pneumonia and flu, and was to return home and self- pisolate as if I actually had the virus.

That was this on Tuesday.  Yesterday, Thursday, the doctor phoned to say I had no sign of the corona virus.

I tell this story just so that you know how the medics proceed, but also to praise the amazing, polite, quick and efficient service. Part of the quick response was probably owing to my age, but I am still quietly astonished, given all the adverse commentary.  The national system might freaky, but in this case I cannot praise the system enough.

The 20-second hand wash

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All my other drafts are a bit anodyne at the moment, whereas you, dear reader, are undoubtedly tuned in The Virus.  I thought the following was quite useful, and I haven’t seen it in detail elsewhere: The way to wash your hands.

”Many people don’t wash their hands correctly. They may think 10 seconds is enough. No. They may just rub a little soap between the palms and ignore other parts of the hand. And if you do a slipshod job, the coronavirus pathogens will still be on your hands when you’re done. And if you touch your hands to your face — as humans do about 200 times a day — those pathogens can infect you via eyes, nose or mouth.

”It doesn’t matter whether the water is warm or cold, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention explains on its website. And antibacterial soap works just as well as regular soap. But running water is key, since standing water could be contaminated.

”You need to clean the areas between your fingers, as well as your thumb and the backs of your hands, Dr. Mark Gendreau,  the chief medical officer at Beverly Hospital in Massachusetts, told NPR:  Scratch your palms in order “to scrub the fingertips and to get some soap under the initial part of the nail,” he adds.

”Wash for at least 20 seconds — singing the “Happy Birthday” song twice or the alphabet song at a reasonable pace will usually get you to that benchmark. (Maxwell Posner & Elena Renken, NPR News, March 7, 2020).

If you feel like singing at all.

Corruption in Eastern Europe

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The EU is turning a blind eye to a giant “scam” in eastern Europe, says The New York Times. Hungary’s nationalist PM, Viktor Orbán, was the first to spot the opportunity: his government sold huge tracts of state-owned land to oligarchs and political allies, ensuring their support by enabling them to claim vast sums in EU agricultural subsidies each year. It’s “galling” that Orbán blames the EU for “every imagined indignity” while “milking billions” to prop up his illiberal rule. Across the region, these subsidies have become “a lavish slush fund for political insiders”.

Companies owned by the Czech PM Andrej Babiš pocketed $42m from farm subsidies last year; in Bulgaria, just 100 “land barons” picked up 75% of the country’s agricultural subsidies in 2016; in Slovakia, an “agricultural Mafia” has pushed small farmers off their land.

What really grates is that EU bureaucrats know all about these practices, but won’t act. They believe interfering with subsidies provided under the Common Agricultural Policy would be seen as infringing on national sovereignty. Unfortunately, this approach has failed to stop the corrupt and powerful enriching themselves with public money.   (The New York Times)

My comment: This is not news and is not confined to Eastern Europe.  Rich Brits are doing exactly the same thing.  Mr.Rees-Mogg, an ardent Brexiteer, prominent Tory and very rich, owns huge country estates and claims off the very organization (the EU) that he effects to despise.  Having made a fortune he has “had his meal”, is sated in profit and is happy to leave the EU.  Be sure, nonetheless,  that the British government will continue to reward him and other large landowners, as before.  All this is horrendously unEpicurean.  Corruption always is.

Rules of life

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Question:

”I’m in my late 20s and I’m feeling more and more constrained by rules. From the endless signs that tell me to ‘stand on the right’ on escalators or ‘skateboarding forbidden’ in public places to all those unwritten societal rules such as the expectation that I should settle down, buy a house and have a family. Do we really need all these rules, why should I follow them and what would happen if we all ignored them?” Will, 28, London.

Answer:

We all feel the oppressive presence of rules, both written and unwritten – it’s practically a rule of life. Public spaces, organisations, dinner parties, even relationships and casual conversations are rife with regulations and red tape that seemingly are there to dictate our every move. We rail against rules being an affront to our freedom, and argue that they’re “there to be broken”.

But as a behavioural scientist I believe that it is not really rules, norms and customs in general that are the problem – but the unjustified ones. The tricky and important bit, perhaps, is establishing the difference between the two.

A good place to start is to imagine life in a world without rules. Apart from our bodies following some very strict and complex biological laws, without which we’d all be doomed, the very words I’m writing now follow the rules of English. In Byronic moments of artistic individualism, I might dreamily think of liberating myself from them. But would this new linguistic freedom really do me any good or set my thoughts free?  (from “Life’s Big Questions”, answered by the BBC’s “The Conversation”).

My comment:   Written and unwritten rules are what allow us all to live together, however uneasily, without constant bickering and even violence.  Just as generosity, politeness and consideration – Epicurean virtues – grease the wheels of human interaction, so do rules, such as the side of the road you drive on (to be rather obvious), and thanking people who kindly help us (not always so obvious)  – these allow us to conduct our daily lives as seamlessly as possible, without constant bickering and raised blood pressure.  I’m glad there is a rule that jails those who cheat and steal things that don’t belong to them.

We should be glad to have the rules, inconvenient though some may be.  Does the reader have any rules he or she cherishes – or heartily dislikes?

Gender bias

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 Almost 90% of people are biased against women, according to a new index that highlights the “shocking” global backlash to gender equality.  The UN Development Programme (UNDP), which produced the findings, is calling on governments to introduce legislation and policies that address engrained prejudice. Despite progress in closing the equality gap, 91% of men and 86% of women hold at least one bias against women regarding politics, economics, education, violence or reproductive rights. It found that almost half of people feel men are superior political leaders and more than 40% believe men make better business executives. (Guardian, 4 March 2020).

No one purporting to follow the ideas of Epicurus should be gender- biased.  Period.  As for men being better political leaders and business executives, that is total nonsense.

But by coincidence I was having a conversation with my wife about the difficulties of trying to run a business employing roughly 50-50 men and women, something I know about personally (now history).  We had a policy of giving three weeks paid sick leave a year to all employees, full of part-time.  We were always stretched, and if anyone was away sick, their work had to be done by someone, adding to the stress.  (I remember confronting one female employees who took her precise three weeks paid sickness allowance every year, and who told me to my face that it was “part of her holiday entitlement”. This was cheeky and ridiculous, but nothing to do with gender).

What was more troublesome was that the women were constantly staying away from work because children were on holiday or were sick, or some older relative needed their help.   This was a daily event for one employee or other.  Who will it be today?   (They also had more genuine sickness absences, although that was not their fault.)

I realize that society still expects women to be the nurturers and home keepers, and that makes doing a full- time job difficult to navigate.  But constant absences are also resented by the people in the company who have to fill in for them.  Because this resentment, if openly expressed, sounds mean and petty, most people grumbled to themselves and sighed.  But it is a problem feminist activists and elevated employees on the UNDP do not address and can be a real human problem.  It was regarded as unfair on women and men who had no children or elderly relatives.  I resented it myself, to be honest.