I talked to a fellow computational linguist this morning, someone who's a tenure-track professor in New York City and also a Jewish emigre from Uzbekistan. Interesting getting the inside story from NYC. She had mild COVID symptoms in March and thinks that a majority of people in the area may have already had COVID, explaining why there aren't too many new cases now in New York. She expressed strong dissatisfaction with both Governor Cuomo and Mayor de Blasio - too slow to shu...t down earlier when the risk was great, and too slow to open up now that the risk has likely mostly passed. She says she hasn't been to Manhattan in months, the subway is full of homeless people, Manhattan has been left in tatters by protests, and professionals who have been the ones to keep the city going (as the bedrock of the tax base) are leaving the city because they all have to telework anyway. Also, and this is from a college professor, she says she doesn't think she'll take any vaccine, at least not right away. This wasn't out of some anti-vaxxer ideological position, and I couldn't fault her quite simple reasoning: how many concoctions has the drug industry come up with that afterwards turned out to be harmful? Indeed, we ourselves have had to live with the long-lasting medical consequences of drugs taken by previous generations.
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