Ever since March 1st I have been trying to write a more self-reflective piece on myself and COVID on the first day of the month. I must admit this does not come easy to me, a man from a fairly working class background and area. It is not what we do really, at least in my age group. The diary site for me has morphed into analytical studies of neoliberalism...  Read this >>

As the pandemic proceeds through numbered opening-up stages, the future is fracturing into a spectrum of divergent times-after, like the Pink Floyd album cover with one ray of blackness going into a prism and seven colors going out. First there was "we're all in this together", with a collective holding of breath and a radical leveling of public experienc...  Read this >>

This is the second part of the thread on market failure and the private hospital and healthcare sector, having posted part 1 on the 19th June. This post picks up and examines the details of the triple crises of market failure in private sector health, particularly in private hospitals during the pandemic. It is worth noting that financial pressure on the ...  Read this >>

I find myself now chronicling pandemic politics in Jacksonville, Florida, USA as we prepare for the Republican National Convention . . . though it is not always easy to keep up. Infection rates and hospitalizations have been increasing in Jacksonville (nearly coterminous with Duval County), and according to local news the average age of those testing pos...  Read this >>

OK, so the juries out on masks, there are experts who say that we should wear them and there’s experts who say that we don’t really need to. Neither Boris nor Trump wear them, so why should we really bother. I’m no scientist, but I can tell you one thing for sure, when I wear my mask (which is in public and always in closed places) I fe...  Read this >>

There’s been so  many things I could have written about during the last few months, (and probably should have, but I’ve been dealing with our new reality) for example my thoughts on the Black Lives Mater demonstrations, after all I’m the mother of an 8 year old mixed raced daughter who is more than aware that her white sister has a ...  Read this >>

Today I was on the bus. I needed to go to my office to get some books. The faculty had kindly organised for academic staff to enter their offices for a time slot of fifteen minutes each. The campus was still closed, and I really needed some books from my office for my current research and teaching preparation. It was ten past ten in the morning, and I was...  Read this >>

On June 16, I reported bars and restaurants in the beach communities of Jacksonville, FL, USA closing for cleaning and testing of staff after being identified as the source of clusters of COVID-19. (According to the local news, that was as a result of infected customers self-reporting to the businesses, not contract tracing.) Since then, at least 15 more ...  Read this >>

I can’t remember now who wrote it, but a few months ago I read an insightful piece that argued that Boris Johnson doesn’t actually want to be Prime Minister. It’s too much like hard work. But he does want to have been Prime Minister. This explains a lot about recent events in the UK: it’s a statue of himself that he wants...  Read this >>

The end of power politics has been frequently advertised but never actually materialized. Interestingly enough, great-power rivalries are pronounced dead or irrelevant in the aftermath of major conflicts, such as World War I, World War II, and the Cold War. Since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft is...  Read this >>

Since the pandemic began, we have told and thought that our lives will never be the same as it was before the pandemic. However, perhaps nobody knew how different it would be and what it would look like. I may have underrated COVID 19’s impact on my life as I had underestimated its impacts on public health at the beginning of this year. This had con...  Read this >>

My 96-year-old uncle Johnny passed away last week, not from COVID-19. He served in the Navy in WWII, married my mom’s older sister Pat, ran a dairy farm and other dairy-related businesses, and had a great sense of fun. Yesterday, I watched the livestream of his Catholic funeral mass. I’ve read in recent months about Zoom funerals, memorials, ...  Read this >>

In a recent online article a colleague of mine discussed the oft-used aphorism that when all you have is a hammer all problems look like a nail (available here). I believe that in psychology this is related to the Einstellung Effect: how our previous experiences negatively effect our ability to solve problems. I was reminded of this with two recent publi...  Read this >>

This entry has been very much delayed due to the enormously challenging question of childcare, or rather the continuing absence of it. Over the past weeks, it has been at first immensely stressful and then increasingly draining to keep working around constantly changing work schedules and the energetic schedule of a two year old. In a way, I feel as thoug...  Read this >>

In May my posts on this site carried some analysis of COVID and the mass market failures that have occurred in vaccines and medical technologies, aged care and health and healthcare that have been the hallmark of the last six months. The background or structural precursors to the present raft of market failures were largely attributed to neoliberal market...  Read this >>

In July 2010, I left my parents home to live an incredible experience in Québec, Canada. I finished high school at École Secondaire des Patriotes (Saint-Eustache, QC), and I came back to Brazil. But I came back to start my University life in 2012. I used to go back to my parents' house every holiday until 2015 when I returned home for five m...  Read this >>

I live in Jacksonville, FL, USA. Bars were allowed to re-open on June 5. Roughly ten days later, three bars and two restuarants in the beach communities have closed due to clusters of cases centered in them, according to local news. One bar, Lynch's Irish Pub, had 7 employees test positive -- and reportedly at least 15 customers -- after a customer called...  Read this >>

The USA is now polarised not only around issues of race and the POTUS. It has a problem with open-up states, a real problem of massive amounts of new hospitalisations with COVID, and huge and prolonged spikes in new infections. Any proponents of opening up need to consider what occurs if a whole host of necessary prerequisite are not in place, such as org...  Read this >>

Bolsonaro is now also in the ‘mad emperor stage’ of leadership, with reports that Brazil has ceased to count or publish statistics on COVID cases. The epidemic in that country is spiralling and it is now the second worst hit country after the USA. Brazil’s health ministry took down the website that had been recording fatalities and total...  Read this >>

The unfolding drama that is 2020 continues to shock, with the global anti-racism protests vying for banner headline space with the ongoing response to COVID-19. At first glance the horrific murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis would appear unrelated to the COVID-19 outbreak. However, its continuing effects emphasise a fissure that has significantly affec...  Read this >>

Two weeks ago, I was writing about the politicization of Covid-19 and Americans taking to the streets to protest the violation of their individual rights imposed by “stay at home” and other Covid-19 safety measures. However, the global pandemic that has eclipsed virtually every other global issue since February 2020 disappeared from American f...  Read this >>

I travelled to Cambodia with my mom to see Angkor Wat and its cities a few years ago. The public transportation system of the country was not well-developed at the time when we travelled. We used a Tuk tuk, which is a two-wheeled carriage connected to a motorbike, to travel around the cities. It was an open carriage, and so we were able to enjoy the breez...  Read this >>

            I started this series of entries with positive ways social media are being used during COVID-19, yet of course know is used for good and ill – intentionally, unintentionally, and all at the same time.             In my 31 May en...  Read this >>

This whole week has seen the USA teetering on the brink of real social and political collapse, with the POTUS having invoked the need for a military presence on the streets, measures way beyond that of the deployment of the National Guard. This week has not been normal by any stretch of the imagination. The are multiple news channels carrying images of mi...  Read this >>

Welcome to June! I love this month for several reasons: it's my birthday (June 7), it's cold in Brazil then I can wear my favorite winter stuff, it's the month of Northeast parties (called Festa de São João, google it), and it's the precisely the middle of the year. Well, I'm excited about my birthday. This year I'll not have a party no...  Read this >>

As the lockdown restrictions ease, current affairs programmes are full of people voicing opinions on whether they should ever have been put in place. Public figures such as Jonathan Sumption have eloquently put the case that such regulations, as well as being damaging, are an unjustified restriction on personal freedom that both infantilises and demonstra...  Read this >>

The other night I watched the launch of the NASA / Space X Dragon capsule on its Falcon 9 rocket, via a live feed provided by the BBC. The last few minutes of the countdown were gripping, even though there was little to see until the very end: hearing the various communications, seeing the white plumes of steam rippling out from the launch vehicle as it w...  Read this >>

Over the past few weeks, a big topic of debate has been the relationship between civil servants, politicians, and scientists. The repeated refrain from government on policy around Covid 19 has been that they have followed the scientific advice in coming to their decisions; this may be taken as a laudable strategy, as an attempt to avoid blame if things go...  Read this >>

This is one of those things people shouldn’t do--read some depressing literature during an economic downturn and a pandemic. But given some extra time on my hands, I decided to read Albert Camus’s The Plague (1948), one of those books that I just had never gotten around to reading.  Doing so has been a surreal experience. It is uncanny ho...  Read this >>

Perhaps by virtue of being an academic, I find it easier to analyze than process emotions. Analysis sets me at something of a distance from what I’m feeling, which is generally more comfortable. Neither analysis of nor feeling my emotions is helping much right now, as the US is overtaken by racial protests and riots, with COVID-19 nearly an aftertho...  Read this >>

        Social media is currently used to communicate pandemic education, as I noted in 17 May entry. It is also being used to persuade individuals to alter their behavior regarding COVID-19. Some of the posts mentioned on 17 May serve both purposes. The mechanics of proper hand washing or announcements of government aid...  Read this >>

Most Americans know about the president’s COVID task force, a body set up by President Trump to provide Americans with timely advice about the pandemic and to make decisions about a response. It was supposed to be headed by Vice President Pence, but Trump clearly dominates. Yet, very few people know about my university’s “task force&rdq...  Read this >>

Tomorrow, Monday, 01 June, the British government will start easing the lockdown. In British society, there has been a heated debate about the pros and cons of this step. Does it come too soon? Is it just right? Should the lockdown continue? Many people, particularly parents, think it is too soon to ease the lockdown and reopen schools and nurseries. Ther...  Read this >>