"The United States needs to adopt smart quarantine as soon as possible."

Write Harvey V. Fineberg, Jim Yong Kim, and Jordan Shlain in the NYT. Fineberg is is the president of the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and a former president of the National Academy of Medicine. Kim is an infectious disease physician and a former president of the World Bank. Shlain is an internist and entrepreneur.

In a smart quarantine, anyone in a family who is not well — and if you’re sheltering in place, whomever you are with is considered “family” — must get tested and be separated from the family until results return. While awaiting results, the separated family member can move into temporary accommodations overseen by medical professionals and be tested.

Those that test negative remain in quarantine in their accommodations, and if they test negative again at 14 days, they can return home, where they must continue to shelter in place. Those that test positive leave their temporary accommodations and enter a more formal Covid-19 recovery facility. Most of these people will recover and will be sent home in about two weeks after testing negative at least twice. People who get worse will be sent to an acute care facility.

It would be very hard to get Americans to accept that. Coming forward as "not well" has extreme consequences. You're put in some sort of government camp, it seems, and you're kept there even if you test negative. You get 2 weeks of internment just for coming forward to be tested. What kind of housing would this be? How could it spring up so suddenly in any sort of form we would accept? Or are we so worn down we're ready to be moved around and incarcerated like this?

ADDED: It's interesting that the NYT doesn't have a comments section for this one. I wanted to know how the Times readers reacted. As for my readers, here's a taste:

"Climb into the cattle cars, you'll find showers when you get there" — The first comment on this post, by Bumble Bee.

"Children would no doubt be involved, does a 'smart' policy advocating removing them from their families for 2+ weeks? Also, who is going to work these jobs? Lots of brain power, no common sense" — Mark.

"Perhaps this will be necessary if a truly virulent pathogen were to emerge...but this virus is not that. This 'smart quarantine' is a despot’s wet dream" - Krumhorn.

"Love op-eds like this one without comments, which would be brutal. You think there is any chance I am letting one of my small children who 'isn't feeling well' get sent to a government quarantine unit for weeks? There would be civil war. This has me angry this morning. But yea, let's trust experts" — John Borell.

"When I heard smart quarantine, I thought they meant loosening up on the healthy. But no... Sure, round them up and send them into camps. That’ll work" — tim maguire.

"So you want me to voluntarily go to a facility that likely has others with the disease for two weeks just to find out of I have the disease? Didn't this start at a place in Washington kinda like that? How'd that work out? I'll try my luck at home, thanks" — NoMook said.

What song beat "The Rainbow Connection" for the Oscar for Best Song in 1979?

As long as we're talking about the Muppets, I felt moved to listen to Kermit singing "The Rainbow Connection" (which, as I've mentioned before, is one of my all-time favorite songs):



That's from "The Muppet Movie," so it was eligible for a Best Song Oscar, and it was nominated. Why didn't it win? What beat it out? Here's Donna Summer in her amazing prime...



"Last Dance" won the Oscar.

IN THE COMMENTS: Mark corrects me. "Last Dance" won the year before. In 1979, the winner was "It Goes Like It Goes," from "Norma Rae," which is irksome.



I could accept "Last Dance" beating "Rainbow Connection," but "It Goes Like It Goes" is awful. And yet, it's fitting. The Best Song Oscar tends to go toward the awful.

A Los Angeles Superior Court judge orders Starbucks to put a cancer warning on its coffee because of a chemical — acrylamide — produced in the roasting process.

Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Elihu Berle wrote, "Defendants did not offer substantial evidence to quantify any minimum amount of acrylamide in coffee that might be necessary to reduce microbiological contamination or render coffee palatable... Rather, Defendants argued that acrylamide levels in coffee cannot be reduced at all without negatively affecting safety and palatability.”

Courthouse News Service reports.

According to court documents, defendants did not dispute that acrylamide was a byproduct of the roasting process, but Judge Berle concluded they failed to meet their burden of proof that acrylamide was at “no significant risk level.”...

[California’s Proposition 65 under the Safe Drinking Water and Toxic Enforcement Act] allows an express exemption from liability for naturally occurring chemicals found in food, but those exemptions do not apply to carcinogens that form during the cooking process. The fact that defendants did not add the carcinogen was not enough of a defense, according to the court.

Apparently, you're also getting acrylamide in "potato chips, French fries and some forms of bread."

Defendants’ experts provided risk assessments of the carcinogen, but they did not consider what effect it has when found in coffee. And a report from a laboratory on acrylamide provided evidence that was “unreliable and inadmissible because the analytical chemistry method” was novel and used techniques that were not accepted in the scientific community, according to the court.

Warnings on everything — remember when that was a comic meme?

I don't know when this happened...



... but here's Cracked in 2009 when the comic idea was quite stale, "If Everything In Life Came With Warning Labels" — including a woman's ass with a warning label and a warning label that has a warning label that has a warning label that, etc....



IN THE COMMENTS: Beach Brutus said:

Seems like the burden of proof is inverted here. The State says you have to post a warning unless you prove the dosage is too small to be harmful. If the State wants to compel speech it should bear the burden of proving the product dosage is too high.

Mark said...

Then, of course, South Park beat us to it decades ago with its warning label before every episode cautioning viewers how offensive it is and should not be viewed by anyone at all.

I said, "I'll bet Mad Magazine did it in the 60s" and then remembered a cover from from 1962 (when Mad, which I'd discovered on my own at a news stand, was a stunning revelation to me (it shaped the whole course of my life)):

Stephen Colbert likens talking about Trump with eating Oreos...

... in a bit — from the new show — that begins with Trump's never-eating-Oreos-again routine.

That was pretty funny... and I'd like it more if the clips were embeddable.

Also, Jeb Bush was on the show. Here's the full episode. Jeb comes in about 10 minutes from the end. I thought Colbert handled it very nicely, even as, at one point, he outright tells Bush that there's no way he'd ever vote for him. That's one way to handle bias. Lay it out there. [CORRECTION: Actually, Colbert said there's "a nonzero chance" he'd vote for Bush. I missed the "non" on first hearing.]

Colbert also pointed out his own brother in the audience and got the brother to shake his head "no" to the question whether he agreed with Colbert politically. Colbert's points were: 1. We can get along and be good with each other even though we don't agree about politics, and 2. Jeb must be different from his brother in some ways too, right? Accepting the invitation to knock his brother, Jeb said that George spent too much money and didn't stay true to the GOP brand: limited government.

Other comments about the show:

1. Lovely filmed opening that began with the national anthem in the setting of a baseball game, proceeding to other places around the country, and ending on the baseball field with the ump saying "Play ball!" [IN THE COMMENTS: Mark says the umpire, whose face we only see in the end when he tears off the mask, was Jon Stewart. That punchline missed me. Looked like a generic grumpy old man.]

2. The band is weak, a bunch of pretty boys. I miss Paul Shaffer. And why did they move the band over to the right? Paul was always on the left. Band on the right is the "Tonight Show" set-up.

3. I was watching the show in the morning, having DVR'd it, because I go to bed early, so I particularly liked the interaction, via TV screen, with Jimmy Fallon, and Colbert demonstrating that he was TIVOing Jimmy's show. The 2 men aren't really in competition in the modern world, and who beats whom is a non-issue in the world of anyone with any technology at all. The old Leno-vs.-Letterman drama is passé.

4. Note the consistent theme of friendship and niceness.

5. George Clooney was the first guest but I jumped over those parts. I can't be sitting around watching television in the morning. I did see that George was looking quite orange, which should have been embarrassing after a couple of jokes, earlier in the show, about Donald Trump's strange orange coloration.

6. Mavis Staples, a good idea for the first guest, but she's not the singer she once was. The song was "Everyday People."  There were a bunch of other singers that we were supposed to recognize, but I couldn't.

7. I don't like to redo tags, as noted yesterday, so Colbert's show remains "The Colbert Report" in the Althouse tags.