Michael Hanscom

Enthusiastic ambivert. Geeky, liberal, friendly, curious, hopepunk; trying to be a good person. (he/him)

Year 50 Day 3

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Me in front of a rack of AV gear wearing a dark green short-sleeve button-up shirt with cartoon frogs as the pattern.

Day 3: A long and tiring day of running around making sure captions work and doing impromptu tech support for professional development day at work. The frog shirt is another birthday addition.

📚 Semiosis by Sue Burke

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23/2023 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Fascinating story of colonists struggling to survive on a new planet and working to communicate with the intelligences already on this world. Rather than a single central protagonist, the first few chapters are almost individual standalone stories, jumping a few decades at a time, before events accelerate towards the latter half of the book into a somewhat more traditional narrative. Really neat ideas on how very different species might find ways to communicate with each other. Enjoyed this enough that I just ordered its sequel.

Michael holding Semiosis

One Less Tool To Protect Ourselves

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Washington’s COVID-19 exposure notification app to end May 11:

Washington’s COVID-19 exposure notification app is scheduled to conclude May 11 in tandem with the end of the Public Health Emergency.

Sigh.

Admittedly, I have no idea what the backend costs (monetary, time, employee hours, etc.) for this system have been. It’s (theoretically) possible that things have slowed down enough that the cost/benefit ratio has shifted. But it still feels like one more sign that we’ve just…given up.

Since its launch in November 2020, approximately 235,000 participants confirmed a positive test result in WA Notify. This “successful, lifesaving,” app, as the state describes it, has generated more than 2.5 million anonymous exposure notifications, preventing tens of thousands of COVID-19 cases.

Washington was one of the first states to implement exposure notification technology and consistently had one of the lowest COVID-19 death rates in the country, despite also being host to the earliest known domestic case of the virus.

Boy, all of that sure sounds like something you’d want to keep going, doesn’t it?

After May 11, DOH encourages people who test positive for COVID-19 to tell their close contacts that may have been exposed to the virus.

Which I’d expect most (responsible) people have been doing already, but this takes out a key way of letting me know if I’ve been around someone who tested positive but who isn’t a close contact.

Few, if any, places bother checking or requiring vaccines anymore. Masking exists somewhere between “encouraged” (if you’re lucky) and “tolerated”. And now this. Just one more step.

And the worst part is that if we’d handled all of this better over the past few years, I might be able to look on these shifts as positive signs that things were actually improving. But I just don’t have that level of trust in our public health institutions anymore.