BgMstr4u

Sounds like an interesting salad, maybe with a blue cheese dressing. As long as BOGO (buy one, get one??) doesn't mean they're already in blueberry heaven.

Do you happen to have a good recipe for baking powder dumplings?

The Joy of Cooking wins (almost) every time. I had a yearning for chicken and dumplings (remains of a baked chicken made a terrific stew) like my mother made and J of C’s recipe worked like a charm. Easiest thing in the world. Erma Rombauer and her offspring are my go-to gals.

Staying in shape? Staying???

I agree that immigration regulations have been made more difficult by the pandemic and the closure of government offices in other countries as well as the immigration difficulty here. However, foreign born foreign graduates have been a mainstay of medical care in the US for decades. Medical education has done little to change this.

 

Immigration rules have only become more stringent.

As an example, in 2014 there were 17000 or so United States Medical School graduates in first year positions in training in the US. At the same time there were about 6600 International medical graduates in the same role. The vast majority of those international graduates were foreign born and trained and a small number were Americans who attended school internationally.

Now in 2019 there are about 18000 US graduates for just about the same number of positions meaning that there has been little movement away from international graduates in the last five years. Going back further, the numbers would probably be about the same.

So it is clear than the US has been importing physicians and in relatively large numbers. I have worked in medical education for 40 years and ever has it been thus. These FMGS are usually well qualified and hardworking individuals. They need to pass qualifiying tests to get a chance to practice here. These are physicians who support the medical care system in the US in a way that is generally underappreciated. Now, with that supply chain slowed, it will be difficult for some areas to keep up with adequate medical care and training.

@purplekow, what in your opinion is the reason the US needs doctors from abroad? Is the capacity of our medical schools not large enough? Is that education too expensive? Are there just not enough US citizens going to medical school?

I help an older friend get to his medical appointments. One of his doctors is an American who went to the Saba University School of Medicine, near St. Maarten in the Caribbean. Although he seems as young (and cute) as Doogie Howser, and quite competent, I have not asked him why, and not sure I want to, as it might be taken as a critical question. But why do Americans go abroad for their education? As above -- is there something wrong with American medical schools?

IMHO the problem with the movie is that every character, major and minor, has a following, and so they felt it necessary to create a subplot for each one. Too many moving parts. I think a better way to go would have been to pair up the Dowager Duchess with the Queen for some stiff backbone and upper class quip competition.

The twins?

I have started trying to trim my own hair with scissors. It has not been aesthetically satisfying.

I can hardly do my own toenails anymore. I'm not going to start on my hair!

Haircut.

Thank you. I watched it and enjoyed it immensely.

Pardon if this has already made the rounds.

Watched Hail Caesar! on Netflix almost by accident tonight. I did not know what to expect, and to be truthful, I was captivated by it. I think its strength is that it is a string of scenes in search of a story - usually a recipe for disaster, but in this case charming. The swimming and dance sequences were over the top period perfect. I think Alden Ehrenreich is amazing. The cowboy film bits were pure parody and fun. I thought the movie premiere sequence was wonderful - breaking into his lariat routine, and the brief foray into musical territory when the two start to sing. But that is over before it has even finished the first verse. And the ride up and back on the highway in Malibu - pure Raymond Chandler LA film noir.

Over and over the film builds up a brilliant sequence and then undercuts its ending. The synchronized swimming scene ends with Johansson throwing a tantrum, the dance sequence is cut short by the director, the submarine sequence, made solemn, even almost liturgical by the Red Army choral music and the parodic socialist-realism posing in the boat is undercut by the dog/valise slapstick switch, and finally the actually rather moving centurion-at-the-cross speech cut by the failure to remember the final word. All of them funny. But I kept wondering, Why not let the scenes run to their end, allowing each its full ironic integrity? The parody does not always have to deprive its subject of significance. It’s as though the audience can’t be trusted but has to be led by the nose, beaten over the head, to get the point. You can have both.

So - brilliant, an evening well-spent, but wanting more.

Thank you so much, @bigjoey, for this Cuomo article. Very interesting, very helpful. I wonder if comparable data are available from other states.

This question interested me too @BgMstr4u. I did look into it and there is no easy answer. What I can say definitely is that the numbers reported are NOT on the same basis.

 

Each EU country seems to use different definitions. For instance, the UK reports all deaths where Covid19 is mentioned on the death certificate (as in Covid19 may have been a factor) and doctors have been urged to include any death where they even have a suspicion of Covid19. Deaths in UK hospitals are reported daily while care-homes and elderly residential-homes report deaths weekly; deaths at home are reported within 72 hours.

 

France and Spain have taken a very different stance and only count deaths in hospital. In France, media pressure caused this policy to change about 4 weeks ago - such deaths are now counted but the French director-general of Health says it’s not possible to report deaths in care- or residential-homes in a timely manner. The French union of primary care physicians estimates that at least 9000 people have died of Covid19 “in the wider community” since the start of the epidemic. Spain has of course had a scandal where some elderly care homes were simply abandoned with residents inside. Spain does record deaths at home usually but seems to be having difficulty doing so currently.

Thank you very much, @MscleLovr. I was not aware of these differences. They obviously make statistical comparisons more difficult. Do you know how Germany does its counting? Is there a convenient and reliable description of how different countries do their reporting?

Thanks for good work!

From The New York Times:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/03/world/asia/coronavirus-spread-where-why.html

 

At the end of the story, they say we just do not yet know for sure and why some places were hit and others spared comes down to “a roll of the dice.”

Thank you for this very helpful article.

Since I brought up the question of the US Covid-19 death rate per million factoring out NY-NJ-CT, here are some numbers:

Population: NY: 19.45 million + NJ: 8.882 million + CT: 3.565 million = NY/NJ/CT total population: 31.897 million

Total US population: 328.2 million - NY/NJ/CT (31,897 million) = 296.303 million

Deaths from Covid-19:

NY: 24,368 + NJ: 7,742 + CT: 2,436 = 34,546

Total US deaths from Covid-19: 67,552 Total US deaths less NY/NJ/CT: 33,006

Total US Covid-19 deaths per million: 206.5/million

US less NY/NJ/CT deaths per million (33,006/296.303) = 111.392/per million

I'm not a statistician, so please let me know if I have goofed on this. But the message is clear: without the NY/NJ/CT cluster, the US death rate per million is just a little over half.

Note: these numbers are always being updated. They are based on the RCP data from 8:00 am or so PDT, 5/3/2020.

ADDENDUM:

The death rate per million for NY/NJ/CT:

Total population: 31.897 million. Number of deaths: 34,546. (34,546/31.897) = 1,083.85/million.

My eyes popped out of their sockets on this number. I hope I got it wrong.

No one else in the world has similar numeric outcomes. And why would we blame these numbers on anyone else, anyone? We should embrace it, and be proud of it.

I suppose by "numeric outcomes" you mean raw numbers. In terms of raw numbers, this would appear to be true: the RCP table at this point (a little after 7 am PDT, 5/3/2020) has the US death count at 67,505, more than twice the next two raw numbers countries, Italy (28,710) and the UK (28,131).

But. BUT -- and this is a big but: the US has something like 328.2 million people, Italy has 60.36 million and the UK 66.65 million. The deaths per 1 million population in the US are 206.1, in Italy 475.1 and the UK 423.1. Germany, Brazil and Iran are the outliers among the top 10 countries in terms of these numbers. The question that emerges out of this data to me is, What is Germany doing differently, assuming its statistics are reported on the same basis as the others?

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/coronavirus/

In other words, the US, relative to the size of its population, is actually doing "better" (if such a thing could be said) than most of the others. I might also speculate that because the NYC region (NY, NJ and CT) currently accounts for more than half the raw numeric US death total, a valid narrative about the US situation needs to factor in that anomaly. The rest of the US is nowhere near what is going on in the NYC metro region.

One other thought about statistics. Probably no reporting system is 100% perfect, but there is good reason not to trust the statistics from China, Russia and Iran, because their totalitarian/authoritarian regimes control data for their own purposes. I imagine their numbers are wildly under-reported, which throws the analysis way off. Also Brazil seems low, perhaps because its health infrastructure, including statistitical reporting, may not be as well developed as it could be. Perhaps other third-world countries are in a similar situation.

So, Steven, the incendiary comment above is not entirely justified. Commenting on raw numbers without reference to population size is next to meaningless. I think you get carried away with your rhetoric.

“Why is the Bronx higher than the other boroughs?” Cuomo said.

Just a thought on this: Was not the first NY State outbreak of Covid-19 in Westchester County (New Rochelle?), bordering The Bronx? Which is, perhaps not incidentally, the only NYC borough attached to the mainland. Perhaps there is a geographical factor in the viral spread, i.e., that islands often have more restricted points of ingress. E.g., New Zealand.

You write "they always have been."

Which is no reason they should not be improved. Deficiencies of long standing should always be priorities for correction.

Let's be fair to Governor Cuomo. Subways and buses in New York City are a distinct danger to riders and employees in the age of covid19.

OK. Fair is fair. Cuomo has been governor since 2011. He has been a public official in the federal and New York State governments most of his adult life. He is as intelligent and instructed as he is ambitious. No excuses on grounds of inexperience or unawareness for not knowing the problems. So while people are throwing around “how could you not have known” accusations, perhaps a few should be thrown his way as well.

Subways and buses in New York City are a distinct danger. They are now more than ever, but they always have been, and Cuomo and his ilk have done precious little to improve them. As one who has lived in NYC (and loved it and loves it still) , I will tell you that they always have been a distinct danger. The subway is and always has been a filthy open sewer, virtually impossible to keep clean, not that very much is done to try, and little or nothing has ever been done to structurally improve them. The buses are not as dirty but they are desperately overcrowded much of the time, rarely run on time, and tend to arrive in clusters, making people on overlapping routes with 4 buses covering the same ground wait as long as if there was only 1. Exposing people to bad weather and sometimes to bad people. Bad for your health both ways. No way to run a transit system in the nation’s biggest city.

This has not noticeably improved in Cuomo’s long years of public office. How could he not understand the danger to health and safety the public constantly faces every day from this disgraceful transit system for which he is as governor ultimately responsible? Surely his negligence has contributed to the disaster his state’s greatest city now faces.

When things go wrong, the press works overtime to convince us that every public official, including the President, the Governor of every state, the mayor of every city (yes, also the demagogue DeBlasio) should have known on their very first day in office absolutely everything wrong about their areas of responsibility and have somehow magically fixed it all before anything bad could happen, no matter how many competing concerns they may face, some of them explicitly designed to stymie what good they are trying to do and destroy them politically. And while some do this better than others, none bats 1000. Nor can they. The question is how to achieve reasonable progress in areas of public need, which is an endlessly complex process often actively (and in my opinion, sometimes criminally) thwarted by self-serving political game playing.

Should we cut Cuomo some slack for being the public official responsible for presiding over New York's public transit death trap? Perhaps. But not because he is a Democrat with a possible long shot at the nomination, someone who seems to be liked at the moment, and especially not because he’s not the Monster Trump. There seems to be a double standard here, one for the politicians we like and another one for the ones we don’t. Be fair.

If you enjoy Hilary Mantel's books, she was also the presenter of the BBC Reith Lectures a couple of years ago.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08vkm52/episodes/player

The ABC, BBC and CBC have similar lecture series every year (the Boyer, Reith and Massey lectures respectively). They are well worth taking the time to listen to.

Thank you so much! This is wonderful. A whole series of Hilary Mantel -- 5 lectures. Terrific!

Several hours later: Since this is the season of bingeing, may I recommend listening to all 5 lectures in sequence. Fascinating to hear, stimulating, and for one with one foot in history and the other in literature, at least by academic preparation, a magnificent evocation of the place of the informed imagination in constructing historical narrative.

At this point (6:15 pm, 4/4/2020), according to RCP's chart of state statistics, Florida is now 10th in terms of total deaths, 9th (up from 19th) in terms of deaths per million. That's how quickly this is changing.

Data Comparison Check:

Florida,16 days later: At this point (3:45 pm PDT, 4/20/20), according to RCP's chart of state statistics, Florida is still 10th in terms of total deaths, but 22nd in terms of deaths per million, down from 9th on April 4. And not for lack of testing, at least in relative terms: Florida is third in total numbers of tests administered (273,552), after New York (633,861) and California (280,900). Not the big explosion I and perhaps others were expecting.

As long as we are diverted into Mary Tudor territory: One of my quaratine projects is reading the third volume in Hilary Mantel's trilogy about Thomas Cromwell, who basically ran the English government in the middle period of Henry VIII's long reign. Fascinating, and a wonderful read. First volume is Wolf Hall, #2 is Bring up the Bodies, and this one is The Mirror and the Light (just out this month I believe). Lots about the childhood and early adult years of Mary Tudor. Elizabeth was an infant/very young child at that point (mid to late 1530's). I can't recommend them too highly.

I got hooked on Peet’s years ago. Starbuck’s.... good try but no cigar. And a coffee snob thing that’s actually true: Do you buy your Starbuck’s coffee pre-ground? Don’t grind the beans until just before you put the coffee in the filter. The water makes a difference. Eau de la ville just doesn’t always do so well.

As one says in other, possibly similar, contexts, for example, to people who have put themselves in harm’s way for the benefit of others, or who go out of their way to be helpful, “Thank you for your service.”:) Then look down, shyly smile, catch their eye, and if you can, stroke it sweetly.

Armed with this insight, Asian scholars have examined American ignorance and stupidity on COVID-19, to see if this could impact death rates. For example, does it impact mortality if Americans think, "This is a bullshit thing, I ought to be able to do whatever the fuck I want, and nobody has a right to close my business or my bar down?" Asian scholars have named this the "dip shit American" theory. They have studied whether there is a correlation between being an American "dip shit", and COVID-19 mortality.

Perhaps you could provide links to these provocatively worded studies, @stevenkesslar.

I don’t disagree with your main points here. Anyone who has lived there will agree that cleanliness of public spaces is not a notable cultural characteristic of NYC. The thought of disinfecting the subway can only invite howls of amused derision at the very concept, let alone even the remote possibility of it ever actually happening. NYC is far and away the most significantly covid19-affected urban center in the US, and it could also be the dirtiest, though SF and LA are in the running for that title now. Public politeness and personal cleanliness are no doubt practiced by many, but are not universal norms. Would that they were. I would certainly welcome a national campaign to raise politeness, good hygiene and cleanliness to the rank of primary American values.

But I do wonder about responsible scholarly publications seriously using the term “dip shit Americans”, deserved as it may be.