[conspire] COVID at the end of 2021

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Dire Red (deirdre at deirdre.net):

> On Fri, Dec 31, 2021, at 11:50 PM, Rick Moen wrote:
> >   The mean viral shedding for unvaccinated individuals is 8.9 days with
> >   a standard deviation of 10 days. This is where the 10 day quarantine
> >   came from. Yes, you read that right, while most will no longer be
> >   infectious, many are still shedding long after, but they had to put the
> >   line somewhere. For vaccinated individuals the mean length of viral
> >   shedding is 2.7 days with a standard deviation of 3. This is just one of
> >   the many benefits of vaccination. 
> 
> In fairness, when the quarantine was initially proposed, they didn't
> realize the extreme long tail. This whole debacle has been a
> compromise between estimated political will and reality.

In _present context_, the above misattribution of the top text to me 
doesn't cause problems, but _generally_ this will be a reminder to
everyone to not just assume that your software's automated "[person X]
wrote" quotation strings will work correctly.

The quoted text was not by Rick Moen, but rather by a Boston Medical
Center resident physician going by the moniker "Myfanwy Callahan" on Facebook.
(In fairness, I didn't include the specific attribution, only the
Facebook link -- but presented it as indented block-text with a URL
at the bottom to make clear that I was quoting, not writing.

Anyway, please (y'all) take a minute to state attributions correctly.
(It didn't happen here, but I've seen people arguing furiously with
me over something I never said and don't necessarily even agree with,
just quoted -- apparently under the mistaken impression I was the
author.