A few days ago — in my Feb 8th post — I linked an article from MSNBC that showed that the major issue in the US lack of response to the covid crisis was, not trust in science, but trust in government.
Another take on this question comes from…
Washington Post, Charles Lane, 8 Feb 2022: Opinion: Let’s be honest about why the covid death rate is so high in the U.S.
Short answer: obesity.
In many ways, we’re fortunate that the coronavirus pandemic didn’t strike, say, 30 years earlier. In the early 1990s, the science behind what would become the mRNA-based coronavirus vaccines was still in its infancy. Ditto smartphones, which have been instrumental in gathering and disseminating pandemic-related data. Zoom was pretty much science-fiction, too.
In one major respect, though, the United States would clearly have been better off in 1990. At that time, the maximum adult obesity rate reported for any state was 15 percent.
In 2020, by contrast, no state reported a rate lower than 20 percent, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Sixteen states’ rates were above 35 percent.
It’s a striking observation, but not surprising to anyone looking at vaccine or mandate protests on TV by crowds of mostly fat people. Just saying.
Of the 16 states with adult obesity rates 35 percent or higher, 10 — Alabama, Arkansas, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Ohio, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Texas — rank in the top 20 for age-adjusted per capita covid death rates, according to Bioinformatics CRO, a consulting firm.
To be sure, these states rank among the lowest for accepting vaccines, which became widely available a year into the pandemic.
So what is the larger issue here? That states who dismiss vaccines also dismiss health advice? Perhaps; certainly a correlation.
The even larger issue is how humanity in the 21st century, and in recent decades, still succumbs to the motivations of our evolutionary past, rather than any kind of rational engagement with the world about nutrition and health. That is — our primitive ancestors, on the plains of Africa, evolved to value, to have instinctive urges for, sugars and fats. Fruits and animals. Because they were in relatively short supply, and to be valued whenever they were found.
This urge for sugar, for sweets, has not gone away in modern humans, despite our development of agriculture over the past 10,000 years or so. It’s hard for us to resist sweets, for anything deep-fried.
Yet… different cultures, different countries in our modern world, seem to have reacted differently. Why are Americans so fat, compared to those in the rest of the world? For that question I do not have an immediate answer.
Endpiece
I spent most of the afternoon struggling with apparent bugs in Microsoft Access.
As I mentioned 3 days ago, there was a problem with my developing new Access queries, in order to generate the bibliographic pages on my website, this website, from my Books database. I downloaded the latest updates to Microsoft Office, and one issue went away: the one where closing a database did not dissolve the temporary .ldb file that was created while the main database (.mdb) was opened.
Still, when I ran the code to build one table from another, I kept getting an error message that the source table could not be found. It was there; there was no misspelling; what was the problem?
Today I decided to try hacking the database, working around the apparent issues. Was Access somehow complaining that any recently created tables, or queries, could not be found? Was this something about the .ldb file of “locks information files” that is captured when a database is opened?
Perhaps only a recently created table or query would be affected…? So I found an old temp query, one of dozens I’ve saved as temporary in-work queries without deleting them, and modified “Query15” to use the same inputs as the newer query that, in my code, Access kept denying access to.
And it worked.
