This is the first of the final 4 guest posts, with the final 3 essays going up throughout the day today and possibly tomorrow.
arrieve:
Our first priority has to be Covid. Until that is under control, until everyone can safely leave their homes and go to work or school, we aren’t going to be able to really start rebuilding in the wreckage Trump has left us. The country is like a trailer park after a tornado; we need to clear away the debris and rebuild, but first we need to set the broken bones and stop the bleeding.
We need a national strategy, and the money to support it. Whatever it takes to get vaccines manufactured, delivered, and jabbed, do it. At the same time we need to control the spread. Test, test, test. Test at schools, test at workplaces, test at the borders. Mandate masks. Enforce the lockdowns.
Instead of blanket stimulus checks, support small businesses. Support those who’ve lost their jobs with enhanced unemployment. Provide coverage for those who’ve lost their health insurance. Get us out of this nightmare, get everyone on their feet, and then start to plan about what comes next.
Because I think that will be an even bigger challenge. When we finally emerge from lockdown, we’ll see, and have to come to terms with, all the havoc this virus has wreaked, all the damage it has caused. The ranting on the right about the cure being worse than the disease and the rise in suicides and depression aren’t entirely wrong – they’re just premature. I don’t think that particular fallout is really going to hit until the worst is over, when we crawl out of our burrows and try to resume what we used to think was normal life, and discover that we can’t. The economic fallout will probably last for years – so many jobs lost and never coming back, businesses gone, bankruptcies, evictions. And we don’t know much about the long-term effects of Covid yet; thousands of people may never completely recover.
So many lives shattered, and there’s an emotional bill that hasn’t yet come due. I often think about the series the NY Times ran after 9/11, Portraits of Grief, remembering each of the 2900 people who died that day. They were full of little details — funny stories, favorite bands, the teams they followed, how they met their spouses — that made each person more than a name. I read every single one of them.
Now we’re losing that many people every day and they’re mostly just faceless. We can’t begin to memorialize them all. Every year at Ground Zero they read the names of all of the victims and it takes more than three hours. Imagine doing that every day. There are 58,000 names on the Vietnam Memorial in Washington. We lost 65,000 Americans in December alone.
This is not something that it’s up to the government alone to handle. But it’s critical that they create the space where we can start to acknowledge and process this unbearable tragedy as a society. I know that in many ways I’ve been very, very lucky. I have enough money, and the luxury of being able to stay home. Even so, ten months of being alone in a tiny NY apartment, rarely seeing a friend or even a neighbor in person, has taken a profound toll. There were many nights last spring when I lay awake in the dark listening to the endless ambulance sirens and thought that if I started screaming I’d never be able to stop. Some days I still think that.
But I’m okay and I’ll be okay. I’ll come through this, and I’ll do whatever I can to help others come through it as well. Doing that will require the security of knowing that grownups are in charge and taking care of everything that needs taking care of. I need the luxury of being able to ignore the news for a while so I can take stock of the world these cruel, careless years have left behind and figure out how I’m going to live in it. How wecan live in it, together.
Thank you for sending this in, arrieve! (WG)
Punchy
I would love to know if the “this shit is just the flu”, “this is a joke!”, and “masks dont work!” attitudes are uniquely American, or does every country have a significant percentage of their pop saying these things? I see AUS and NZ have beaten this, so that tells me those thoughts are not universal….What percent of, say, Germany, believes COVID is a hoax?
arrieve
And I’m pleased by how much has changed since I wrote it — the Covid remembrance last week and the plans Biden has announced were a necessary start on the long road ahead.
Brachiator
Another great and thoughtful post.
The hits just keep on coming.
taumaturgo
Notes from the best profit generating healthcare system in the universe.
“Adventures in For-Profit-Medicine: The owners of The Heights abruptly forced the Houston hospital to shutter its doors after it fell behind on rent. Doctors tried to treat patients in the parking lot, but private security and police prevented the staff from retrieving medical equipment from inside the building.” Counter-punch, 1/22/21
West of the Cascades
Great guest post!
OT: Four headlines lined one above the other right now on WaPo.com … ah, Biden:
FEMA would operate up to 100 federally run mass vaccination sites under Biden plan
Senior Democrats drafting plan to give parents $3,000 per child in Biden-backed program
Biden to increase federal food benefits among executive actions aimed at stabilizing economy
Biden to reverse Trump orders seen as hostile to federal workers
arrieve
I just realized that the Covid remembrance was all of three days ago. I think my sense of time may be permanently broken.
Just Some Fuckhead
Apparently Fox didn’t get the unity memo.
Just Some Fuckhead
How about we do both with blanket stimulus checks?
Major Major Major Major
@Punchy: Every western country seems to have this problem, but I have a suspicion they’re mostly following our lead.
Eunicecycle
If we are going to help small businesses again, I want it to be REALLY small businesses this time. I’m not smart enough to come up with the criteria, but last time multi-million dollars businesses with hundreds of employees got it because one of their locations had less than 50 employees. And no one should get over $1 million. If that’s too small to help you, you are not a small business.
arrieve
@Eunicecycle: I agree. I do have faith that the Biden people could manage to direct the money to actual small companies.
Soprano2
I foresee many, many choirs all across the land doing requiem masses dedicated to those who died from COVID when this is mostly behind us. Last night in rehearsal we worked on a piece just called “Requiem”, that was written after the 2004 tsunami. It was fitting for this time. I look to see some new music come out of this period, too, about the pandemic.
JoyceH
@Major Major Major Major:
Boy-howdy! QAnon even has supporters in Europe! Hey, rest of the world, adopt our jeans and our bands, not our batshit conspiracy theories!
jonas
Unfortunately, not an insignificant number. Just like here, also riled up by right-wing politicians and Russian agitprop, mostly as a means of disrupting anything Merkel does.
Poe Larity
So Elon’s gf Grimes tweets she has Covid two weeks ago and she, Elon, Joe Rogan and Dave Chappelle hang out backstage in Austin after Dave’s shows this week (an outdoor arena at a BBQ joint). Of course, unmasked group pics indoors.
Chappelle is now positive. WTF, some kind of modern day measles party?
Martin
Here’s why Jen needs to work on the ‘um’s – they give away when she’s not prepared for a question. She’s doing great, but the reporters are going to punish her for that in time by piling on when they see it.
Florida Frog
@taumaturgo: how is this possible? I read the article and couldn’t figure it out. Hospital implies in-patient care. Are there patients inside? Who is caring for them?
Betty Cracker
Thoughtful post — thank you! I particularly enjoyed this comparison:
So true!
zhena gogolia
@Punchy:
Russia sure does.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Just Some Fuckhead: This is true, a lot of small businesses are relying on the stim checks to stay afloat.
jonas
@Eunicecycle: It should rely on what kind of capital/credit you have access to. Publically traded companies should be right out. They can borrow and/or float stock to cover themselves. It needs to help local restaurants, small music venues, bed and breakfast inns, and the like. And the first round of PPP missed a bunch of people because they did’t have a “business banking relationship” to process the funding.
Martin
@Punchy: They would correlate to authoritarianism. The key to authoritarianism is to keep the public in a state where they can never know what the truth is, on anything.
sab
Today my husband got a call back from a state approved pharmacy where my husband had signed us up for covid vaccine when it becomes available. They said it is too early to schedule us, but they will call us when t’s close to our turn ( we are in the 65 to 70 group.)
Also my grocery store pharmacy, which is the pharmacy I actually use, just sent me an e-mail.
So suddenly signs of organization are popping up. I doubt the timimg is a coincidence.
And my now vaccinated dad will be allowed car rides with family February 1, eleven momths after the lockdown for them started.
Lyrebird
@arrieve: Thanks so much for sharing this!
Not permanently broken, but probably messed up until we can get more of a schedule of actually doing things outside.
I feel incredibly lucky to be in the suburbs with more outdoor options, and I have to remind myself of that every hour. Half of our household is “1b” but we can’t get appointments for vaccines, etc.
Thank you again for writing, & hope these comments help you feel a little more like some friends have come to visit.
Just Some Fuckhead
@?BillinGlendaleCA: I’m always a little horrified by people who think small business owners require our help while the employees that were paid poorly and then laid off have some magical ability to survive.
WaterGirl
@sab: It takes 6 weeks from the first shot – and the second shot of course.
Nobody in particular
Perhaps 15 years ago I learned how enamored Leo Tolstoy was with Henry George’s ideas as a political economist. “Enamored” is a bit of an understatement. He was the top “disciple” and it’s just political economy, not a religion, tho’ Tolstoy was a very “spiritual” person. This is what Tolstoy wrote about what he termed “The Land Question.”
This may not seem to have anything to do with COVID or a pandemic – and Mencken’s maxim aside: “There is always an easy solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong.”
There is also an exception to many hard and fast rules. After 20 years of cogitating on the matter and researching it, I’m growing confident this is that exception. But wait, you’ll say. COVID!
I tend to view any system homeostatically. It is not always best to compartmentalize. Like it or not, our home, our earth, the land, is a closed system. There are no absolutes in a closed system, among other things mathematicians do not like. Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-godels-incompleteness-theorems-work-20200714/
I now believe Georgism is as much a solution to the problem of growing wealth disparity and inequality as it is to climate issues, sustainability, and survival of the species. Even if we control viruses, COVID solutions require a population willing to alter their own individual behaviors for the public health of the entire population. We’ve raised a generation who are even more truculent about such than previous populations in a pandemic. Bodies lying in the street with festering boils of pus draining from corpses would tend to focus the mind, but we don’t that, although Trump was headed that way. Explaining this clearly and fully might take pages but I just have a hunch Tolstoy and Henry George may have been on to something. Churchill thought so and so did a majority of Americans at the time. Today, he’s been erased from history, and the reason is quite obvious to me. He was co-opted by the socialists but Georgism is not socialism. Most of the framers were proto Georgists as were John Locke, Rousseau, and even Moses. Leviticus 23 – 25.
So maybe calling it socialism is ill-advised. But Pubbies will do that. Anything they don’t like is “creeping socialism.” With a population that doesn’t have a deathwish, we could be out of the woods by June.
The Smithsonian: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/monopoly-was-designed-teach-99-about-income-inequality-180953630/
Chyron HR
@taumaturgo:
I think it’s still a little too early to pivot from “Medicare for All” to “Shoot the bourgeois doctors”, friend.
WaterGirl
@Martin: What are you watching that makes you say that? if i google for a press briefing, all i get is yesterdays.
Martin
@jonas: Yeah, I agree on publicly traded companies. They should be exempt.
But there’s a fairly straightforward solution here that would solve a lot of problems:
Provide a moratorium on rent and mortgage payments. Mortgages get extended by a month for every month it’s in effect. So you’re still on the hook for the same amount. If you have cash, you can make additional payments – borrowers choice. This system propagates upward through the banks to the Fed. The Fed supports the economy by floating the banks.
It turns off a LOT of rent seeking. In the hospital case, if the building owner has a loan, that’s extended and the renter can stay in. If you just pause the whole system, you don’t need to coordinate with 100 million households and businesses, you just need to coordinate with the banks at the top. That means you can do it fast.
You still need stimulus because people need to eat, but it’s a lot more modest.
Martin
@WaterGirl: It just happened within the last hour.
Nobody in particular
@Punchy:
It’s global, universal, and historically in accord with previous human behavior during a pandemic. And that goes back about 2500 years in the recorded history.
And teenagers are immortal.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Just Some Fuckhead: In a lot of real small businesses, the owners are also the poorly paid employees.
MomSense
@sab:
My mom is getting her first dose next week. I can’t wait until she is fully vaccinated.
taumaturgo
Never too early to call on the greed of the cartels that has caused thousands of deaths and have the gall to call themselves the best healthcare in the universe.
Just Some Fuckhead
@?BillinGlendaleCA: Sure, on paper.
Nobody in particular
@Martin:
Day of the Dolphin with George C. Scott and Paddy Chayefsky’s Altered States were two films based very loosely on Dr. Lilly’s work.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Just Some Fuckhead: The paper is sometimes reality.
Benw
@MomSense: I’m counting minutes until my folks and my wife’s folks get it – all over 75 with health conditions. I’m going to fucking lose my mind if any of them get COVID before they can get the vaccine
Cameron
@Nobody in particular: My God, a fellow Georgist! I’ve been one for over 30 years. You follow Michael Hudson, too? I was a member on the FB group Democratic Freedom Caucus, but quit while I was in an alcoholic rage. Were I to become a member of a Democratic caucus, this would be mos def where I’d go.
MomSense
@Benw:
Same here – what’s left of my mind anyway.
Zelma
My county had a webinar this morning which was useful but discouraging. The Health Department has set up vaccination stations but has run out of vaccine. They are hoping for more come Monday but don’t know. The local ShopRites are also vaccinating, but they are overwhelmed. They are asking for patience. I’m 1B so maybe I’ll get my first shot by mid-February if I’m lucky. And then the second shot and then six weeks. So I’ll be “safe” by April. And like everyone else will have lost a year of my life. At my age, I don’t have that many to spare.
WaterGirl
@Martin: I would love to watch that now – where did you find it?
sab
@WaterGirl: Yes. Pfizer says a week after the second shot. Moderna says two weeks. So if they can keep DeWine’s schedule (which I doubt) the earliest spouse and I can expect to be safe is third week in March. But Dad should be good to go by February.
The Moar You Know
@Punchy: Last I read on DW.com, over 30%. At least that many are not planning on getting vaccinated either. Continental Europe is going to have some serious issues with this.
The two places I have not read about this really being an issue: the UK and Italy. But just because I didn’t read it doesn’t mean it’s a problem; it’s just not popping up on the news outlets I read.
The Moar You Know
I think that is the point where a lot of really, really bad shit could hit the fan. Not just suicides and depression, bad as those are.
trollhattan
Am even more objectively pro-vaccine after reading this.
WaterGirl
@trollhattan: That fits with what Dr. Fauci said yesterday. He said that it’s not more contagious, in the sense of infected people giving off more of the virus – but he said something about it having twice the viral load in terms of finding receptors in the nose, lungs, etc.
I was thinking about that last night – so you might not be more likely to catch this one than the original COVID, but if you get twice the viral load, you are going to be sicker, more likely to end up in the hospital, and dying.
If this one is more drawn to the receptors, it seems even more reason to stay home. I wonder if that’s why they are now saying it’s best not to even go to the grocery store.
I can only guess that that means that even “masked and distanced and in and out in 15 minutes” is no longer safe enough.
Uncle Cosmo
Right…but not really. No one ends up “95% protected.” The 95% number is a value across the entire vaccinated population. It means that 95% of all those vaccinated will develop antibodies to the virus that keep them from contracting the disease.
The remaining 5% will not. IOW, one of every 20 people vaccinated will not develop antibodies (i.e., will not seroconvert) and will remain vulnerable to the disease. (Which is why along with the inoculations we need testing, testing, and more testing, to identify those folks!)
The idea, of course, is to get a high enough fraction of the population producing antibodies to the virus, so should anyone contract the disease they are very unlikely to transmit it to anyone else (because most of the people around them will be protected). That’s what driving the R below 1 means. And given that there seems to be no common biological host for SARS-CoV-2 other than humans, that’s how you get it to burn itself out.
When I worked in Biological Warfare Defense in the late 1990s we looked at vaccines from the standpoint of protection factor and seroconversion rate. “Protection factor” was a measure of how large a dose of the BW agent a vaccinated individual would have to get to overwhelm the vaccine-provoked antibodies and give him/her the disease. And even there it was a population measure given in terms of the unprotected median effective dose, or ED50** – the dose such that half of the unprotected population that received the dose would come down with the illness. If a vaccine increases the ED50 for a given disease across all vaccinated seroconverting individuals to X times ED50, then X is the protection factor.
We analyzed one BW agent where the extant vaccine had a high protection factor but not so high a seroconversion rate. Our customer (the Army) was considering developing a new vaccine. We pointed out to them that the PF of the current vaccine was high enough that an increase of 10, 100 or even 1000 in PF for the new vaccine wouldn’t help much – the casualty rate would be dominated by the fraction of those inoculated who did not seroconvert. We recommended that they direct their efforts to developing a vaccine with a higher seroconversion percentage; and if that was not possible, developing one that had a different means of action and using both vaccines, giving the new one to those who failed to seroconvert after receiving the current vaccine, in hopes some of them would then seroconvert and so obtain protection, yielding a higher effective seroconversion rate for the combination of vaccines.
** Technically, “effective” means “causing an illness severe enough to produce the effect the user wants.” When that effect is death, we refer to an LD50 or median lethal dose. (There’s also a concept called the LCt50, but to quote Airplane!, that’s not important now.) NB in biological warfare, death is not always the aim: “incapacitation” often will have a far greater impact on the fighting ability of an enemy force. Dead soldiers get “tagged & bagged” and await the Graves Registration unit; very sick soldiers get treated on the spot, hustled back to a medical facility, treated more, and moved into recuperation – tying up major manpower and resources. /tmi
WaterGirl
@Uncle Cosmo: Yes, I was sloppy with my language.
Matt McIrvin
@Uncle Cosmo:
Is this true? If it were, it seems to me that the rate of severe COVID among the vaccinated would be much higher than it is.
If I recall correctly, in the field trials for the mRNA vaccines, almost nobody got a severe or long-COVID case. The 95% immunity figure was for developing any COVID symptoms at all, but the people who did get it nearly all got mild cases, whereas among the unvaccinated, something like 10-20% get pretty bad ones. The protection from severe COVID seemed better than the ~99% you’d expect. So there seems to be some difference between those 5% and unvaccinated people.
Matt McIrvin
…yeah, I think the seroconversion rates for most of these vaccines are much higher than 95%, at least at the most effective dose schedule. For instance, here’s one where they got 100% seroconversion with a 30 microgram dose of the Moderna, though I don’t know if that corresponds to the dose being used:
https://www.fiercebiotech.com/biotech/moderna-s-covid-19-vaccine-trial-starts-enrolling-high-dose-arm
I think 95% is the rate of people getting any COVID symptoms in the field trials.
WaterGirl
@Matt McIrvin: @Uncle Cosmo:
You guys had me all confused about this, so i checked with David Anderson.