Favorites January 30th 2022

Pretty short one today

Matthew Yglesias @mattyglesias

Abuses of the pardon power have happened in the past (including under Trump) but the fact that *all* crimes committed in the District of Columbia are federal crimes eligible for presidential pardon creates a terrifyingly vast loophole in the constitutional system.

Acyn @Acyn

Trump says if he’s re-elected, he may pardon people prosecuted for their actions on January 6th https://t.co/VLlkGyUr32

This got a lot of discussion today, seems bad.

Timothy B. Lee @binarybits

They did this study in Philadelphia because of course they did. link.springer.com/article/10.100…

Hey, there we go, more interesting study design!

Bob Wachter @Bob_Wachter

SF has turned Omicron corner. Hospitalizations ⬇10%, cases⬇50%. Both these %'s confounded by challenge of discharging Covid+ patients; test availability. Better metric (less confounded): asymptomatic test pos. rate @UCSFHospitals: way⬇. 10d ago, it was ~16%. Last 3d:~4%.(1/2)

I'd like to see those curves going down faster, but this is at least some good news.

Tom Wenseleers @TWenseleers

Seems that the second Omicron subvariant BA.2 may soon be about to cause cases to start rising again in South Africa... Or at least to stop the decline in new infections. Shows how fast immunity wanes & evolution can catch up.

And of course, there's always some possible bad news if you look for it.

San Francisco, 2019