Wednesday night. The end of the start of the end of the week.

This whole pandemic is a fascinating social phenomenon – a global experiment none of us signed up for. (Except for those crazy brave folks who volunteered for vaccine testing – kudos to them all.) Aside from all the, you know, death and suffering and unemployment and assorted carnage, there’s a lot of fascinating stuff happening overall: experiments with UBI (universal basic income), online education, large scale work from home, etc. All those things probably never would’ve happened without the pandemic: the world was forced to take those measures, and we get to see firsthand what works and what doesn’t. (That’s science for you – when something fails in the most spectacular fashion, you can at least learn from it.)

At work, there’s now a whole bunch of coworkers who never actually met anyone on their team. We’re all just disembodied voices on weekly calls, or slightly different personalities in text-based chats. (Everyone has mostly stopped using webcam video streaming on business calls on account of it being incredibly creepy.) Things still get done, but it feels a little odd and highly futuristic to work with a remote group of people each of whom logs in from their own little anti-pandemic shelter using computers more powerful than anything they had in the 20th century. Pretty badass, in a very specific and highly geeky sort of way. Of course, then one of my coworkers’ kids screams or laughs in the background, and the whole illusion kind of shatters, but it’s still fun to make-believe.

In today’s culinary adventures, apparently there’s really not that many carbs in a fruit-filled dinner of two bananas and three kiwis. I mean, sure, yay fiber and all that jazz, but I might be the only guy in North America who legitimately has to go out of his way to carb up. Heh.

In covid news, William Foege, possibly the greatest epidemiologist of the 20th century, the man who helped eradicate smallpox, and the former CDC director (who is now 84 years old), sent a letter to the current CDC director, Robert Redfield. The letter was sent two weeks ago and was supposed to be private, but someone leaked it to the media. You can read it here. It’s short and to the point: Foege put in writing what was obvious to everyone, that the CDC became a political puppet and squandered all of its hard-won reputation. He advised Redfield to send a clear and detailed apology letter, point out what’s going on, and lead the good fight until he inevitably gets fired. (He also pointed out that in the future, the CDC’s inaction will be studied as a great example of what not to do.)

The letter was sent two weeks ago. Redfield didn’t stop being a puppet. I guess we know where he stands… He occasionally stops some of the most insane requests coming from the White House, so he’s neither a hero nor a complete sock puppet. In other words, both sides kind of hate his guts at this point. I’m curious if Trump will replace him with Dr Atlas, who is not an epidemiologist at all and who seems to be a big fan of the herd immunity model. (That’s the one where everyone except for the 1% gets sick. They must’ve been so surprised when they got infected at the White House. Heh.) Just like with everything else, we’ll see how that plays out. Pandemic patience is a virtue, eh?