My close friend is a firefighter/paramedic and was told by his chief "to call this number as quickly as possible" to get on the early vaccination list. He did and was given the first dose last week. It became a race for those even most eligible.
For the rest of us, it's a bit of crap shoot depending on where you live. Some counties in our state have created sites where you can enter in your information so that when you're eligible, you'll be notified. For those of us not in those counties, we're hoping similar systems, because the alternative is very messy and will almost certainly add to the body count.
Substantial resistance is built up after 8 days from the stuff I've read. Yeah immunity level is not great, but look at mortality in the studies.
AFAIK nobody that got even a single dose ended up in the hospital. That's huge if true. That means hospitizations will plummet well before everyone is through their second dose.
I dug deep for this lol... It looks like somebody ballparked it from a graph, I read it in a news story I can't find. It looks like COVID incidence among study participants comes to a screeching halt somewhere around 8-12 days after first dose
See this graph
> Cumulative Incidence Curves for the First COVID-19 Occurrence After Dose 1, Dose 1
All-Available Efficacy Population
Also keep in mind this graph is probably based on COVID diagnosis date. Since it's unrealistic to test positive the day you contract COVID, I think it's reasonable to say it might even be effective from day 3-5 on
They allegedly have partial immunity after the first dose (how partial i have no idea, and it might fade really quickly if you don't get the second), but its possible its enough to have some effect if enough of the right populations have the first dose.
I think the complications getting transit home is a major cause of point two there. Co-workers that have to catch trains out to commuter towns always needed to be mindful of the time, and may have needed to drive the final part of their journey.
Big contrast to being able to catch an underground/subway within a few minutes with no planning, and fall back to a relatively affordable Uber if you get carried away and miss the last one
The nerds (I say that will all due respect) will fight your stance on this until the end of time, but of course you're correct. There have been discussions of distributed GitHub since the day the website launched, but the concept will never take off. 99.99% of developers understand the tools are a means to an end, not the thing worth focusing on.
Not OP, who's already answered, but I was idly thinking about this earlier today.
I'd fund a side concern that grew trees to couple-of year-mature sapling level, for planting either commercially or for CO2 absorption. The former hopefully funding the latter.
it's come up a lot in the news recently - the whole 'plant trees, save the planet' thing - but it's genuinely something I've wanted to do for years. Here in urban UK we cut down trees way more than we put them back up again.
If I didn't have to spend it immediately, I'd use the 3% SWR rate on it and spend 30k a year until I died or it ran out. In this case I would probably support a lot of indie art/film projects on crowdfunding, I'd scan new projects daily for something that catches my eye and set a calendar reminder to check them out halfway through their campaign and if they weren't close at that point I'd contribute what I felt was a good amount if I thought they might reach funding. I'd also keep an eye out for people in my social circles that might be down on their luck for whatever reason and see how I might assist them without directly handing them money (fix their car, good clothes for interviews, etc).
---
If I had to spend 1 million at once... I'd probably fund a pilot of an idea I have for an alternative way of applying philanthropy while simultaneously helping individuals not only get good CV experience but also cover part of their educational experiences, I'd rather not say more than that because I'm actively trying to find someone to back the pilot. There's 1 trillion pledged through the Giving Pledge and if even 1 billion of that was used this way, we could create more than 200 million hours of service and help 50k people pay for most of a 4-year degree while providing good CV experience and directly helping in potentially thousands of communities.
---
If I had to spend it all at once, on multiple projects...
- I would find 20 students to give 5k each towards tuition
- I would set aside 500k to attempt to create manufacturing trade training, to some degree, digitally on a monthly subscription model (something cheap, 10-20$ a month) and build community tools on this platform. People could learn a lot of the basics and theory and then try and find people in need of apprentices. Hobbyists could also use it to improve their knowledge base. Eventually I'd try to leverage this to partner with one or more major manufacturers to create virtual versions of their machines so people could practice on a perfect simulation of real equipment in a virtual environment (either VR or just on a monitor) not unlike flight simulators so they can develop good habbits without damaging expensive tool heads or ruining materials learning. Also building in some sort of gamification could help encourage people to learn these skills and would hopefully create a good base of new people to apprentice with real equipment for these trades.
- The remainder, I'm not sure. Some would probably go to some of my favorite YT creators like LGR, Gaming Historian, Townsends, etc.
I really... dislike... that a lot of philanthropic people take their money and throw it at hiring academics to sit around and think about problems - or worse - fund charities they control and then pay those people to largely evaluate other philanthropic endeavors to then hand grants off to.
I have a GED, non-profits and NGOs won't touch me with a ten foot pole becuase I don't have at least a Masters and a bevy of accolades. If I had a good idea or project they also wouldn't fund me because, on paper I've not made some great accomplishment(s) and don't have a string of letters after my name and social swagger and as a white male I don't even fit the mission of some philanthropic persons because I'm not a woman or I'm not a person of color or I'm not fro an economically depressed area. I'm not saying it's wrong to champion those types of people and attempt to help them I'm just saying... I don't like it.
If I was independently wealthy (I need a million or less, sadly I'll work til the day I die though based on my current net worth after 16 years of full time employment) I would spend my free time not chasing more wealth, I'd spend it doing stuff to better an individual, better my community and/or better the species.
Instead, I worry about if I'm going to be able to pay my bills most months and spending 5 minutes here and 10 minutes there looking at what the wealthiest people of the world are doing and more oft than not just shaking my head.
Bezos, I like Bezos, he's got a vision and he's chasing it with large cash infusions from his own pockets. Sam Altman, much lower net worth but same thing... he seeded Y Combinator Research out of his own money and now he's throwing himself full time at Open AI, Sam believes in that and can put his sole focus on it while not needing to worry about income or a future career path. Some of these people though, they have tens of millions of dollars (or tens of billions of dollars) and they still run companies, still heavily invest via VC funds/firms, still have this podcast and sit on these 3 boards and own these 12 companies all trying to make more more more money, and then are like "yeah, yeah I'll write a letter pledging I'll eventually give up half of my money".
In the meantime, the market is up 20% since January and PE ratios for the largest companies are still reasonable. Uber’s success or failure has no bearing on the broader health of the market.
For the rest of us, it's a bit of crap shoot depending on where you live. Some counties in our state have created sites where you can enter in your information so that when you're eligible, you'll be notified. For those of us not in those counties, we're hoping similar systems, because the alternative is very messy and will almost certainly add to the body count.