Monday, January 02, 2023

Monday Afternoon Links

Miscellaneous material to start your week.

- Zhenguo Nie, Yunzhi Chen and Meifeng Deng study the relative merits of COVID precautions, finding upward ventilation and masking to be the most effective combination in reducing the concentration of infectious particles. And Pascal Irrgang et al. find an altered immune response after multiple vaccinations which consists increasingly of a non-inflammatory antibodies.

- Peter Armstrong writes about the reasons for concern that 2023 will be an even more grim year than 2022 from an economic standpoint, with most people having to face continually-increasing prices amidst declines in employment and real wages. And Sam Meredith reports on the efforts of the Wellbeing Economy Governments partnership to work on a more meaningful definition of well-being to measure policy choices - while noting that the background to that work is a "polycrisis" which has largely been ignored in favour of GDP-only measurement.

- Charley Adams reports on the increasing recognition among health care providers in the UK that its national health service is under intolerable (if deliberately-chosen) stress. And Simon Jenkins writes that anybody interested in saving public health care would approach the crisis with a war footing - making the minimization and denial from the Cons a clear indication that they're willing and eager to see the system fail so its spoils can be handed out to donors. 

- Finally, Philip Drost and Craig Desson discuss what the history of rail transportation in Canada can tell us about its future prospects - with past decisions to privatize passenger rail service and tie its operation to other railways' operations making rail travel less desirable than heavily-subsidized highway use.

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