Vaccine Volunteers, Travel Blogs Rode Credit Card Wave, Patagonia Schoolhouses, Fashion Industry Collapse

We bring you content all about becoming vaccine volunteers, how travel blogs rode credit card wave, visit Patagonia schoolhouses, fashion industry collapse, the best Covid-19 coverage, a new 60k United Explorer card offer, talk about airline pricing in the Covid era, a deadly Pepsi contest you probably never heard of, we have some fun naming cc combos and lots more! Thanks for reading and supporting my blog! Comments are always open!

TBB Blog Mission: To Educate. Entertain. Inspire. In That Order!

Support TBB by applying for CREDIT CARDS or visiting our LINKS or Donate

You like my blog? Send a link to someone please!

COVID-19

Ed Yong, who writes about science at The Atlantic, is becoming one of those writers who has become a must read in this pandemic world. This is a must read: How the Pandemic Defeated America. If you are going to read one thing today in this post, make it this one, he puts it all together so comprehensively it is simply brilliant. It starts out like this and…keeps going!

Despite ample warning, the U.S. squandered every possible opportunity to control the coronavirus. And despite its considerable advantages—immense resources, biomedical might, scientific expertise—it floundered. While countries as different as South Korea, Thailand, Iceland, Slovakia, and Australia acted decisively to bend the curve of infections downward, the U.S. achieved merely a plateau in the spring, which changed to an appalling upward slope in the summer. “The U.S. fundamentally failed in ways that were worse than I ever could have imagined,” Julia Marcus, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School, told me.

Wait, we are not done with Ed Yong’s work yet. Immunology Is Where Intuition Goes to Die. Amazingly educational read. And fits perfectly in the “Educate” part of my blog’s mission, which has not changed since day one by the way. Our body is weird…you add a brand new and different virus and it gets even more weird:

The thing is, the immune system is very complicated. Arguably the most complex part of the human body outside the brain, it’s an absurdly intricate network of cells and molecules that protect us from dangerous viruses and other microbes. These components summon, amplify, rile, calm, and transform one another: Picture a thousand Rube Goldberg machines, some of which are aggressively smashing things to pieces. Now imagine that their components are labeled with what looks like a string of highly secure passwords: CD8+, IL-1β, IFN-γ. Immunology confuses even biology professors who aren’t immunologists.

Another interview with noted epidemiologist Larry Brilliant: Coronavirus future in America will be whack-a-mole. Read every answer he provides! Here is one:

Q: What’s to stop it?

A. We need synchronized swimming. We need all 50 states swimming toward the same goal at the same time, for the same period of time. That’s what will stop it. And if we don’t do it before the election, the (fatality) numbers at the time of the election will be horrific. [Good luck to us all!]

I am on a roll today with amazing reads, here is another one: Two decades of pandemic war games failed to account for Donald Trump. In case you do not get it yet…the script how to respond to this was played out in a simulation game in the past. And then, you know…

The scenarios foresaw leaky travel bans, a scramble for vaccines and disputes between state and federal leaders, but none could anticipate the current levels of dysfunction in the United States.

I hope this does not turn out to be true and the virus just magically disappears, just like a miracle. The Winter Will Be Worse. I am seriously thinking of moving somewhere warm in the winter now that my wife can work from home the rest of the year and son does not have to go back to the office until June 2021. Because I just don’t see us doing things outside much when the cold hits us. Thought about Florida but…

When the US and South Korea get the first Covid-19 case on the same day back in January 21, 2020 and then US gets over 5 million cases and over 165,000 of our fellow citizens in body bags while South Korea gets 14,600 cases and only 305 dead (as of August 8)…you know something YUGE went wrong here. And to come out and state that we are doing a great job is simply phucking nuts! The Unique U.S. Failure to Control the Virus. If you are not angry what can I say? Go comment at The Points Guy blog! 🙂

If there is one thing that makes this virus so different than all the others is this! Why are some people with coronavirus asymptomatic — and what makes them so contagious? If our scientists could ever figure this one out…

Asymptomatic transmission “is the Achilles’ heel of COVID-19 pandemic control through the public-health strategies,” according to a May 28 editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Hopefully this ongoing tragedy will humble us all. Screaming “We Are #1” was never a good idea and now… The US Is Disastrously Behind in Covid-19 Testing. Again. It is maddening to me that we are not making controlling of the virus the number one goal…still, months later and after so many body bags and so much money thrown at it already.

Testing is one part of the equation. Contact tracing is another, and so are masks and physical distancing and improved ventilation. But curbing the spread really all comes down to limiting the number of susceptible people an infectious person can come into contact with, she says. “If we want to do that, we’ve got to be serious about throwing everything at it,” she says. “And I don’t think we’re serious about throwing everything at it in most parts of the country.”

In case you were thinking about it: Do You Want to Be a Vaccine Volunteer? How do you sign up for a trial? Who is eligible? Will you be paid? Could an experimental shot protect you? Could you get sick? Who covers the costs if you do? Here’s what you need to know. Make sure you get full answers on who pays if something goes wrong ok?

I am afraid sooner or later we will all wonder the same thing…How Did I Catch the Coronavirus?

For the majority of the nearly five million COVID-19 cases across the United States, the point of infection is unknown.

MILES & POINTS

HOT CREDIT CARD OFFERS: There is now a 60k Chase United Explorer card offer. For a standard workhorse card I recommend the 60k Chase Sapphire Preferred card. For a standard premium card I recommend the 50k Chase Sapphire Reserve card. For a standard 2% cash back card I recommend the Citi Double Cash card. Available with my links.

As expected, the banks are starting to come out with better travel rewards credit card offers. The personal United Explorer card is out with a 60k United miles offer after the typical $3k spend in the first three months which makes it very attractive and I think my household will go for two 🙂 Chase also came out with a United Club Infinite card for 100k United miles but at a $525 annual fee I definitely would not recommend it right now in these no business travel pandemic days. Both available with my links, thanks for your support!

The must read post in this section is this: Travel Blogs Rode Credit Card Referrals Wave: What Comes Next?  The commercialization of this hobby led it to its demise…maybe we can get some of these entrepreneur fake experts move on to make another dollar somewhere else. It was never about you, it was “all about conversions”. I may have a few more things to say at the BLOG BUZZ section below…

In the past decade, some travel bloggers became millionaires — sometimes several times over — by publishing breezy posts about world travels, complete with detailed reviews of business class seats and hotel rooms suites. Now that business is in peril, and it’s not clear when, or if, it will return.

TRAVEL