Us Australians have a certain knack for telling everyone to get stuffed.

Oh, I'm talking about myopia. Presbyopia is almost inevitable with age regardless. Now, astigmatism has unclear causes, but most of it is likely not genetic, so there you go again.

I don't think most people realize how physiologically messed up we are compared to our ancestors (not folks from the Middle Ages, I mean, but true Homo sapiens hunter gatherers). It's like comparing wolves to pugs.

Wolves with a life expectancy ~35 years (men) and ~30 years (women).

In most centuries except 20th and 21th century I'd probably already dead.

That is not how life expectancy works. It is mainly neonatal mortality that bring the average down, not that people dropped dead en masse in their twenties or thirties. In almost all periods of history, if you make it to one you can expect to live to your fifties or more.

Anyway, this is escaping the scope of this thread.

Tag

Roraima will be the first Brazilian state to get rid of Covid. Good news right?

Well... not really. Roraima has an estimated 8% infection rate and current projection get as high as 12% in the next 2 months

And of course, those numbers are fairly under reported

Regardless, they will achieve herd immunity before the year end, unless the virus suffers some mutation

When they work out life expectancy they include deaths of children under 5, in History this group suffered very high mortality rates compared to modern populations, when comparing Adult to Adult life expectancy there is a far closer correlation for life expectancy between historical and modern populations, if you made it to your 20's as a hunter gather it probably meant you had a good chance to be active until your 70's and 80's    

Trump often blamed the pandemic on China. Philippe Lemoine looked through the evidence and presented it on Quillette. And frankly, there is no hint of any conspiracy or coordinated effort to hide the truth. There are indication of fuckup of local authorities though, but nothing that prevented the circulation of information for more than a few days, a week max. There is indication that national chinese authorities didn't knew about this before December 30th, one day later they announced it officially to the world.

https://quillette.com/2020/08/24/the-china-syndrome-part-i-outbreak/

Personally it doesn't matter where it came from or how it started.
The real issue needs to be focused on actually stopping it and saving lives.

It's been a rollercoaster though, November-December-January I was fighting fires on rotating deployments across an entire continent, then had to deal with floods ravaging my response area, then into Lockdown because of COVID... La-Nina is likely to be a thing this summer so it might not be as busy on the fire front. Yay.

Hopefully we get a handle on COVID before the fire season, because having a few hundred firefighters together is asking for trouble and emergency services cannot afford to be taken offline.

Well, first of all: thanks to your work. You live in a different country, but I know close to me are people working similar to you, that are protecting me from disaster. I am thankful for that.

On the topic: I agree that the focus should be on saving lives. Nevertheless I think we should hold the authorities accountable for their actions and also looking at what went down to learn from it for the future.

Some authorities in western countries (*cough* trump *cough*) have blamed china for the virus (mostly to deflect critic on their own shortcomings). The information presented in the article shows, that likely no conspiracy went down. But fuckup of local politicians and burocrats happened, like as described in the article the panicked desinfection of the Hunan seafood market before properly taking samples. That robbed us early on of a chance to gather more information that could've helped to fight the infection.

To be clear: such a fuckup can happen everywhere. So it is more important to look at it and learn, what can be done better in the future, also assuming the next pandemic might as well start at my country. I want my local authorities to act timely and with a proper plan. Therefore I think it is important to look at what happened early on.