VirtualBirds, November 19, 2020

Notes before the video:

Dan Kennelly added to Dr. Tom's news of a new COVID test called COVID Lamp. Lamp is an acronym and the testing is apparently more reliable and much faster than the current PCR tests being used by health authorities country-and-worldwide. Details in this article here: https://www.technologynetworks.com/diagnostics/blog/lamp-based-testing-for-covid-19-340508

Here's an article on the unnecessary obstacles to mass COVID testing from The Lancet in the UK. Their take is essentially a note sounded by the Birds early in the meeting that since politicians never admit they're wrong, they're reluctant to change the approach they committed to early in the pandemic to testing, etc. This could lead you down a rabbit hole with related links in the article, but the piece itself is short: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)32170-X/fulltext.

Speaking of rabbit holes, the last thing Dan mentioned in the meeting today was a site called HowMuch.net. Dan specifically mentioned it in the context of discussing the most valuable export by country. To no one's surprise, Petroleum was the biggest single category, but its genuinely fascinating to see the world mapped out this way: https://howmuch.net/articles/top-export-in-every-country. Canada's biggest export is petroleum. Collectively, I'm sure we're wondering if the braintrust behind "Build Back Better" is aware of that.  If you'd like to see the other categories, just shorten the link to https://howmuch.net/. Grab a coffee before you do. You'll be there a while.