Why were infant children getting scurvy in 1910? Because pasteurization, which finally made cow's milk safe to drink, denatured vitamin C, and the children of the wealthy were weaned later than poor kids. The undiscovered cure was a little bit of cooked potato.
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Does this mean you should drink bleach? No. Stomach acid makes the bleach useless against disease. Inject the bleach directly into your veins, and use Pinboard. (But sign up for Pinboard first)
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(Addendum—I misspoke upthread in a confusing way. When I say "weaned" I meant infants who were fed a diet of pap and pasteurized milk, not breast milk, which contains Vitamin C. Rich kids got pap for two years or more. Poor kids ate real food sooner, and got breast milk longer)
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My own suspicion is there is some confounding factor that will explain the huge regional differences in the impact of coronavirus, but I can't begin to fathom what it is.
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The New York Times is giving some attention to this story today. Note how all four theories put forward (weather, culture, age, and chance) are inconsistent with the facts laid out in the same article. Something odd is affecting the spread of this pandemichttps://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/03/world/asia/coronavirus-spread-where-why.html …
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I want to be clear that I'm not being coy—I don't have a pet theory about what is happening. But we need to be honest with ourselves that something *is* going on, because the uneven pattern of spread is not consistent with any theory of the disease so far put forth in public.
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(As a parenthetical, it's weird how all these articles fixate on bowing in Japan, as if we shake hands nonstop in America. If I was to fixate on a difference, I would choose eating in public, wearing shoes indoors, or talking on public transit. But nope—it's always the bowing)pic.twitter.com/orwk1tfP3v
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The idea that Indians keep a respectful physical distance from one another is also a treat for anyone who's ever been made sweet love to standing in an Indian queue. Sometimes it feels like the NYT learns about the world from an 1890 Baedeker guide chained to the editor's table
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People in my replies claiming that lockdowns explain everything—they do not explain Japan. This is an elderly, crowded country that was very late to adopt significant measures (other than school closings), with community spread since at least early March. And yet not so bad. Why?
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Regardless of the numbers, by now you would expect to see the kind of crisis that hit Lombardy or New York. Japan is a free society and you can't hide tens of thousands of deaths.
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