Very Vary

     Variety used to be (and actually still is, at $400 per year for a subscription) a Hollywood/show-biz insider newsletter, glossy of course and filled with all of Hollywood's inner workings, everything a Miss Whistledown* could want to reveal.  Oops, there's that word, variety.  Or various.  Or by changing a few letters a bit more you have...variant.  And my, isn't that word the news of late.  How many variants or mutations of this coronavirus will there be?  And will the vaccines and boosters work on any or all of them?  And if not, can you mix and match the vaccines from different companies since, well let's be honest, some are seemingly better than others.  My, my, it just spins the minds to think of all this...

     Okay, enough of that.  The virus world is indeed changing almost daily and I won't even attempt to pretend that this or that is the "latest" information.**  A quick guide to the variants themselves came from Smithsonian; and a video from STAT depicted how such viruses mutate.  And sad as it is, an earlier piece in The Atlantic put all of the pandemic into an easy to understand (if difficult to comprehend) metric...at the time it was written, nearly 2 people were dying of Covid every minute (a video from National Geographic's 360 Project artistically expressed these horrifying numbers visually).  But to really try to grasp what we're facing, one has to gaze at the marvel of nature, it's adaptability and design...and perhaps even more so, it's variety of sizes even in the microscopic world as seen in the opening presentation of a story from National Geographic.  Confused yet?  Check out The Conversation's breakdown of how the vaccines from Johnson & Johnson and Novavax differ from the others against the variants (and why).  Or this from The Economist on why we take vaccines at all...

    Best to check it all out now because by tomorrow such information and charts and grafts may be forgotten, replaced by something new, something more exciting, something that will seem more important in your life.  I bring some of this up because for some reason, my friend has been taking a bit longer for me to "forget" which is my excuse for some of these posts taking a bit longer to get out.  I've been thinking about his passing and all that his wife now has to handle, what she has to search for in order to close accounts or to transfer titles and savings and such.  My carefully coded passwords and codes to many of the accounts my wife and I share would admittedly be a jumble of meaningless letters to her, should something happen to me (we're old school and don't use an all-in-one password manager that stores all of your passwords in one place); thus I've been diligently checking and re-checking all of my accounts and security questions and placing them on a sheet of paper (in our safe deposit box) making it a breeze (in theory) for her or an executor to lock or remove or transfer all of that which would be left.  

     What's the big deal, you ask?  To try and help out my friend's wife, I compiled a basic list of what she has to get going on: getting death certificates (without those, you pretty much can't do much else); a search for (among other things) safe deposit box keys, bank & stock records, a will or trust, marriage and birth certificates, life insurance policies, retirement pensions, tax returns, computer passwords & logins, titles and business agreements; notifying and closing Social Security and Medicare, the DMV (auto), the IRS (tax), credit agencies (Experian) and cards (Visa), realty (mortgage), and the post office (yes, his mail needs to be forwarded if being sent to another address such as much of my mail currently going to a PO Box).  It's all quite clear in my head...now.  But tack on another ten years or a stroke or a concussion and in one instant, such information on my part may all be gone, hidden away in some recess of my memory and all but forgotten, leaving my wife scratching her head and wondering where to even start and how to be sure that she'd found everything (lest I sound like some paranoid control freak, we do have a trust which has much of this laid out...but there's always more, which I'm rapidly finding out).  So that's what I've been doing...updating my lists and instructions and details for peace of mind, not only for me but for those who will still be around long after I'm gone.

    Such "forgotten" people have always fascinated me.  There was the Smithsonian piece about railroad engineer James Curran, an article which began this way: Growing up, Marilyn Curran Ryan remembers being strictly forbidden from opening the drawers of her father’s secretary desk in the living room of their South Omaha, Nebraska, home.  That’s where Union Pacific engineer James Curran kept his blueprints and drawings, including the plans for a very special project that had almost nothing to do with rail lines or bridges: The world’s first ski chairlift.  Since he worked for the railroad, AND never skied, he never got credited with the invention.  Or Elizebeth Smith Freidman who was instrumental in breaking enemy codes in both WWI and WWII (her story on American Experience is worth watching); even though she had created and led a team that would eventually lead to the development of the NSA (National Security Agency), she had sworn an oath of silence to the Navy and watched as J. Edgar Hoover stamped every one of her decoded transcripts with an FBI stamp and took all the credit and erased her from history (her files were declassified 62 years later, long after she had died).  Said the narrator in the piece: If we could miss something as big as Elizebeth, who is crucial in two world wars, who fights crime, who fights the mob, if we missed her, who else are we missing?

Rohingya refugees reaching for food.  Photo: Getty Images

    The Rohingya for one, just one of Myanmar's ethnic minorities and a population described by UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres as "one of, if not the, most discriminated people in the world", as reported by the BBC.  Once numbering close to a million people, the Rohingya are part of an ethnic cleansing program by Myanmar's (formerly Burma) military which recently had a successful coup and takeover of the government; said the BBC article: A report published by UN investigators in August 2018 accused Myanmar's military of carrying out mass killings and rapes with "genocidal intent".  See if this recent report from another BBC article on the non-acceptance of the recent democratically-held election results sounds at all familiar: The armed forces had backed the opposition, who were demanding a rerun of the vote, claiming widespread fraud.  

   And consider the Uighurs, a population which President Biden recently had the State Department declare to China as: ...committing genocide and crimes against humanity through its wide-scale repression of Uighurs and other predominantly Muslim ethnic minorities in its northwestern region of Xinjiang, including in its use of internment camps and forced sterilization.  The "re-education" camps (of which there are considered over a thousand) are considered by many countries as forced labor, even as they produce 20% of the cotton and yarns used in the U.S. (they also produce hair products, computer parts, and other commonly used products).  A report from SBS News shows Nike, Adidas, and Gap as just a few of the perhaps hundreds or thousands of name brands using textiles and products from Uighur forced labor, knowingly or unknowingly.  But it's complicated, said NBC, as retailers such as LL Bean and Uniqlo try to track down their cotton sources.  Here's how Quartz described it: Over decades, clothing and footwear makers have built out long, globalized supply chains, and each step in the chain adds a level of obscurity.  An American company wanting to make a few thousand shirts might place an order with a factory in Bangladesh.  While the company specifies what fabric it would like, it’s often the factory that sources it.  The factory buys the fabric from a textile supplier, potentially in another country, specialized in weaving or knitting fabric from yarn.  They buy the yarn from a spinner, which bought the raw cotton.  For the American company to know where its cotton came from, it has to make sure it’s able to trace each of these steps.  To complicate matters further, cotton is a fungible commodity.  The long-staple variety commonly used for textiles is grown in Xinjiang but also in India, the US, Brazil, and elsewhere.

    Whether an entire population or a single person, a set of passwords, or a mutating virus, it is easy to be "forgotten."  Our long-term memories are short, and our abuses rather long (a tax on owners of slaves once supplied 20% of Kentucky's entire revenue).  The Irish singing group The Coors had a popular song titled You're Forgiven, Not Forgotten.  And one thing I've come to settle within myself is that people and animals come and go in our lives...it's how the world and life works.  But it is up to each of us to not let them be forgotten, to disappear, to vanish without an acknowledgement.  That such things may still be happening in our world, and at such a mass scale, is something we should at least be aware of, even as we think of ourselves and our fight to stay alive and do battle with an ever-adapting virus.  Perhaps our only "job" in life is to not leave a life that makes it difficult for another...simply put, to think of and to remember others.

*Miss Whistledown was the main gossip columnist in the soapy Upstairs-only Netflix fantasy, Bridgerton (no displaying the lives of servants in this series, heaven forbid).

**That said, here's part of what the doctor who first found the South African variant told The Conversation: ...new research from South Africa shows that 501Y.V2 may escape antibodies generated from previous infection.  This means that antibodies from people who were infected with previous variants may not work as well against 501Y.V2.  The research team used blood plasma from patients who had COVID-19 in the earlier surges to see if antibodies in their blood could neutralise, or make ineffective, 501Y.V2.  They found that these patients’ antibodies were less able to neutralise 501Y.V2 relative to previous COVID-19 variants in South Africa.  About a six to 200-fold higher plasma concentration was needed to neutralise 501Y.V2 in a lab setting.