Noise pollution redux

 We recently returned from a trip to New York City and Baltimore. Everywhere we went—hotels, restaurants, Uber cars, cabs—we were assaulted by music that we didn’t choose to hear. Unwanted music is a major peeve of mine. I like quiet. Five years ago, I wrote a post on this topic. Here it is, beginning with the history of how we got stuck in this situation:

In 1949, buses in Washington DC installed a system to play radio programs (mostly music) in their buses and streetcars—conveyances owned by The Capital Transit System, a privately-owned public utility. At least two riders, Franklin Pollak and Guy Martin, were seriously annoyed by this turn of events—so annoyed, in fact, that the Public Utility Commission of the District of Columbia were forced to hold several hearings, in which they concluded that “the playing of radio programming was not inconsistent with public convenience, comfort and safety.”  

Pollak and Martin appealed the decision, and the case ended up in the Supreme Court, which concluded that the radio programs did not violate: 1)  the First Amendment’s protection of Freedom of Speech (programs didn’t include objectionable propaganda); 2) did not violate the Fifth Amendment (the Due Process Clause does not guarantee a right of privacy in public transit equivalent to that in a person’s own home or vehicle). Justice Frankfurter chose not to participate in the case because he felt he couldn’t be objective: he believed himself to be a victim of music in the transit system. Justice Douglas dissented, arguing that playing music to a captive audience was contrary to the concept of liberty under the First Amendment and contrary to privacy under the Fifth Amendment.

Like Frankfurter, I feel victimized by the music. Like Douglas, I believe my liberty and privacy are being violated. But there are more reasons to object.  Noise pollution has serious effects on people: hearing impairment, tinnitus, hypertension, heart disease, changes in the immune system (most of these are stress related). Apparently, our sympathetic nervous systems are adversely affected by chronic noise.

If the Supreme Court can overturn Roe v. Wade, how about overturning “Public Utilities Commission of the District of Columbia et al. v. Pollak et al.” I could get behind that one.

For an introduction to this blog, see I Just Say No; for a list of blog topics, click the Topics tab.

Regaining fitness after a setback

 I’ve assumed that, at age 86, I'd never be considered fit. But if you define fitness—as some do—as being able to perform an activity without undue fatigue, then I guess you could call me fit. Now. After two back-to-back knee replacement surgeries last spring, I spent the summer on the couch. While I faithfully performed the exercises to strengthen my knees and recover my range of motion, my normal exercise routines—which don’t amount to a lot—fell by the wayside. The first time I tried walking upstairs I was huffing and puffing. It’s taken me nearly a year to get my old stamina back.

Because regular exercise helps your body to deliver oxygen and nutrients in a more efficient way, one of the first things that declines when you become inactive is your cardiovascular endurance. After just a few days of inactivity, the volume of blood plasma circulating in your body decreases. Studies show that after 12 days of inactivity the total amount of blood the heart pumps every minute decreases, along with the amount of oxygenated blood available to muscles and other cells.

If you’ve always been an exerciser, even after a break in your routine, your fitness level remains above those who have been sedentary their whole lives. For example, while muscle fibers can shrink during long breaks, they don’t completely disappear, and they do retain a molecular “muscle memory’ that can help them bounce back after you stop exercising. One study showed that older adults needed less than eight weeks of retraining after a twelve-week break to attain their earlier fitness levels. The higher the intensity, the faster the rebound.

I got back to my exercise routines—which consist mostly of on-line classes plus weekly golf—as soon as I could. I wouldn’t call them “intense.”

For an introduction to this blog, see I Just Say No; for a list of blog topics, click the Topics tab.

Looking back on Covid management

Groups such as the World Health Organization, The Economist, Oxford’s Coronavirus Government Response Tracker, and Our World in Data have been crunching numbers to analyze the results of countries’ various methods for controlling the pandemic. Sweden’s hands-off approach is one that has garnered particular attention. According to the analysts, it out-performed the United States, although, when compared to all countries, it came out with an average grade.

Sweden issued no stay-at-home orders and no mask mandates. They avoided lockdown, allowing bars, restaurants, schools, and shops to remain open. Instead, they asked citizens to protect themselves and offered lots of guidance and recommendations for avoiding infections. Most importantly, they vaccinated like crazy. (On average, vaccination reduces the risk of severe outcomes and death by more than 80 percent.) In Sweden, a rapid rollout of vaccines reached 87 percent of the country’s population over 60 years of age by May of 2021.

Sweden’s schools didn’t close, and their students did not suffer learning loss. In the U.S., the virus forced a near-total shutdown of school buildings in the spring of 2020. At their peak, the closures affected at least 55.1 million students in 124,000 public and private schools. Nearly every state either ordered or recommended that schools remain closed through the end of the 2019-20 school year. But many schools, including private schools, reopened by mid-2020. While some people did contract Covid at these schools, the overall effect on the virus’s spread was close to zero. U.S. communities with closed schools had similar levels of Covid as communities with open schools. Despite the emerging data that schools were not superspreaders, many U.S districts remained closed well into 2021, even after vaccines were available. About half of American children lost at least a year of full-time school. Those closures are now largely regarded as a mistake.

For an introduction to this blog, see I Just Say No; for a list of blog topics, click the Topics tab.

Herd immunity never happened

 According to the Wikipedia definition, herd immunity “…occurs when a sufficient percentage of a population has become immune to an infection [from a contagious disease], whether through previous infections or vaccination, thereby reducing the likelihood of infection for individuals who lack immunity.” I kept waiting for this to happen with Covid. It never did, even though it’s estimated that 95 percent of the country has had the disease and nearly 70 percent have been vaccinated. Apparently, the notion of herd immunity should never have been raised. According to a lengthy interview with Dr. Anthony Fauci in The New York Times, the problem is that the virus (SARS-CoV-2) was/is a moving target.

Herd immunity is based on the premise that the virus doesn’t change, and that when you get infected or vaccinated, you’re protected for decades, if not forever. Covid doesn’t act like other viruses. With Covid, protection is measured in months. The virus you got infected with in January 2020 is very different from the virus you got in 2021 or 2022. Remember all those variants—Alpha, Beta, Delta, Omicron? New variants are continuously emerging. What's more, viruses that replicate in mucosal passages, as the Covid virus does, can't be eradicated by vaccines that create systemic immunity. Making matters worse is the fact that 50 to 60 percent of virus transmissions come from people who are asymptomatic—they don’t know they have the disease.

Beginning with the Delta variant, and now in 2023 more than half our deaths are among vaccinated people (“breakthrough” infections), 85 percent of which are old people. The risk to people in their 80s or 90s is hundreds of times as high as it is to someone in their 20s or 30s. Still, according to Fauci, if you’re vaccinated and boosted and have available therapy, you are not going to die, no matter how old you are. Vaccinations do protect against severe disease—even if you’re old like me.

For an introduction to this blog, see I Just Say No; for a list of blog topics, click the Topics tab.