Blog Archives
COVID-19 AFFECTS AGES DIFFERENTLY
Normally, with say influenza, the public takes responsibility for vaccinations, seeking diagnosis, treatment, self-distancing and isolation. When there is a dangerous infectious disease like COVID-19, because the public is unable to recognise infected people and avoid dangerous contact, they expect to be protected, with infected people separated and treated. Voluntary control is displaced by public authority.
When a large part of the population is not very vulnerable, for example only 8% of worldwide COVID-19 deaths to March 30th were people aged under 60 years, the social and economic costs from restrictions to young people’s education and careers should be weighed against the small probability of significant health benefits when restrictions are being considered for renewal. If under 60s act as vectors in transmitting the disease to the vulnerable 92% of over 60s, the latter might not regard their own voluntary social distancing and self-isolation as sufficient to protect them. The calculation of what age groups to compulsorily restrict would require more transmission data than I have available. Authorities have usually imposed the same restrictions whatever are peoples’ ages.
http://www.martinknox.wordpress.com
Cat and mouse?
Is simultaneity possible? Who should make the first commitment?
The fiction novel ‘Short of Love’ is about a couple for whom commitment is ephemeral and elusive despite intervening lovers and children. There is overthinking in this satirical treatment of the vulnerability of love.
http://www.martinknox.wordpress.com
KEEP YOUR OPTIONS OPEN OR HOBSON’S CHOICE?
Are you offering to trade yourself in a partner market to obtain maximum appreciated value? The fiction novel Short of Love describes a new mind set for traders to avoid pitfalls in a romance.
Tom Archer falls for university student Vicki Hillstone, who tricks him to take a lie detector test and finds out he is bedding town girl Barbara. Vicki is distracting Tom from his studies so he reduces his overall vulnerability to love. He ‘shorts’ Vicki for later but he is devastated when she appears to make out with his best friend Richard.
The women counteract Tom’s love commodity investment with tragic consequences. He follows a glittering career in the petroleum industry while trying to take up with Vicki. After the deception of their beginning, can he and Vicki ever become a couple?
Review by Vesna Mcmaster, author and editor.
‘In ‘Short of Love’, Knox has taken the picaresque genre by the cerebrum, presenting a narrative alternately amusing, shocking, and deeply familiar by turns. The unrelenting pace and clean style combine within a paradoxical whole, both epic and microscopic simultaneously. Add to that an author/reader relationship that defies convention, and you have this curious and memorable work, which will present an entertaining challenge to the end.’
