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You are here: Home / Healthcare / COVID-19 / Excellent Read: On (Gradually) Evolving From ‘Pandemic’ to ‘Endemic’

Excellent Read: On (Gradually) Evolving From ‘Pandemic’ to ‘Endemic’

by Anne Laurie|  January 3, 202211:25 am| 133 Comments

This post is in: COVID-19, Excellent Links, Show Us on the Doll Where the Invisible Hand Touched You

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Just remember to tag me and @questauthority when she inevitably files her lolsuit https://t.co/x55tWnGhAz

— Akiva Cohen (@AkivaMCohen) January 2, 2022

An essential step will be deplatforming the most egregious spreaders of misinformation, especially those with ‘official’ credentials — so, good move, Twitter.

Covid Will Become Endemic. The World Must Decide What That Means. The task of 2022 will be figuring out how much action we’re willing to take and how much disease and death we’ll tolerate. https://t.co/SPwrHv1KDk

— Jennifer Ouellette (@JenLucPiquant) December 31, 2021


Seriously — read the whole thing:

… This is not the year-end we wanted, but it’s the year-end we’ve got. Inside it, like a gift basket accidentally left under the tree too long, lurks a rancid truth: The vaccines, which looked like the salvation of 2021, worked but weren’t enough to rescue us. If we’re going to save 2022, we’ll also have to embrace masking, testing, and maybe staying home sometimes, what epidemiologists broadly call nonpharmaceutical interventions, or NPIs.

Acknowledging that complexity will let us practice for the day Covid settles into a circulating, endemic virus. That day hasn’t arrived yet; enough people remain vulnerable that we have to prepare for variants and surges. But at some point, we’ll achieve a balance that represents how much work we’re willing to do to control Covid, and how much illness and death we’ll tolerate to stay there.

“The key question—which the world hasn’t had to deal with at this scale in living memory—is how do we move on, rationally and emotionally, from a state of acute [emergency] to a state of transition to endemicity?” says Jeremy Farrar, an infectious disease physician who is director of the global health philanthropy the Wellcome Trust. “That transition period is going to be very bumpy, and will look very, very different around the world.”

To start, let’s be clear about what endemicity is, and isn’t. Endemicity doesn’t mean that there will be no more infections, let alone illnesses and deaths. It also doesn’t mean that future infections will cause milder illness than they do now. Simply put, it indicates that immunity and infections will have reached a steady state. Not enough people will be immune to deny the virus a host. Not enough people will be vulnerable to spark widespread outbreaks…

Endemicity may always have been the best we could hope for. We can’t eradicate SARS-CoV-2, the virus behind Covid, because it has other hiding places in the world: not only the bat species that it likely leapt from, but more than a dozen other animal species in which it has found safe harbor. Only two diseases have ever been eradicated: smallpox and rinderpest. (Not polio, yet, despite decades of trying.) The successful efforts relied on each of those diseases having only a single host, humans for smallpox and cattle for rinderpest. As long as another host for Covid exists, there is no hope of being safe from it forever. As Jonathan Yewdell, a physician and immunologist at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, bluntly wrote last spring: “Covid-19 herd immunity is a pipe dream.”…

As the pandemic has ground on, we’ve told ourselves different stories about why we do all the things we do to reduce transmission: to protect the elderly and immunocompromised, to prevent hospitals from being crushed, to keep kids safe before child-sized vaccines were tested. We might now have to confront the reality that we need to keep doing all these things just to live in a world that continues to have Covid in it, because vaccination by itself has not made the virus go away. This forces us to learn yet another story about the virus: that while we may individually be protected from the worst outcomes, a transmissible new variant creates a fresh societal risk.

Researchers argue that we are late in explaining to people what endemicity actually represents. “We should have been trying, from a very early stage, to teach people how to do risk calculation and harm reduction,” says Amesh Adalja, a physician and senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security. “We still should be trying, because people have gone back to their lives. They have difficulty understanding that no activity is going to have zero Covid risk—even though we’ve got great tools, and more of them coming in the new year, that are going to allow us to make Covid a much more manageable illness.”…

Variations on Wishcasting vs Reality…

Only 7% of people in low income nations are vaccinated
So when I read a tweet saying “the pandemic is over,” I really cringe
It’s “over” for the healthy, wealthy, highly vaccinated folks who are bored of public health measures—but it’s not “over” for much of the world

— Prof. Gavin Yamey MD MPH (@GYamey) December 28, 2021

Time to stop doing what? I regret to inform you, but there will be COVID restrictions in responsible places as long as there are enough unvaccinated people who get sick enough to crush hospital systems. It’s not gonna stop until there’s some level of community-immunity. https://t.co/ULMw9fUgjS

— Magdi Semrau (@magi_jay) December 13, 2021

Trying to think of analogies for this.
“I’ve been fighting the Nazis for two whole years, giving up my entire social life in the process. I’ve done my bit. If some people, like Jews and gays are worried, that’s on them.” https://t.co/wJLefG9KQv

— hilzoy (@hilzoy) December 30, 2021

And, before anyone asks, I am not personally afraid, just baffled by those around me who seem to think that other people’s lives are theirs to sacrifice.

— hilzoy (@hilzoy) December 30, 2021

It really says something doesn’t it but every single one of these “open-minded” takes depends on a completely bananas misrepresentation of reality-based positions.
Nobody wants endless restrictions. We just want Covid to actually end; they don’t. https://t.co/kuD0PvFRmy

— A.R. Moxon, If You Can Keep It (@JuliusGoat) December 27, 2021

as a smoker, i pay a higher insurance premium and do so without complaint because i understand this is a choice i have made. https://t.co/lS5rP0EdE9

— GOLIKEHELLMACHINE (@golikehellmachi) December 18, 2021

all of that’s long in the past now, but the state made my life significantly more difficult for many years because i chose to act in an antisocial way that endangered people.

— GOLIKEHELLMACHINE (@golikehellmachi) December 18, 2021

fwiw i do not drive while drinking now and have not for a decade, nor do i expect to ever again, because the impositions the state put on me were incredibly onerous and also because i internalized the danger i was putting others in.

— GOLIKEHELLMACHINE (@golikehellmachi) December 18, 2021

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Previous Post: « Evolve. Adapt.
Next Post: Let’s do the math — 20 years and a day of Balloon-Juice »

Reader Interactions

133Comments

  1. 1.

    Roger Moore

    January 3, 2022 at 11:59 am

    Nobody wants endless restrictions. We just want Covid to actually end; they don’t.

    They do want COVID to end. They just think it will end if we all ignore it hard enough.

  2. 2.

    Kent

    January 3, 2022 at 12:03 pm

    In my mind, much of the difference between a pandemic disease and endemic disease is the unpredictability.

    Take the flu, which is endemic. It comes in predictable waves and attacks the population in predictable ways with predictable consequences and predictable classes of people who are vulnerable. We just live with it, have vaccines available, and whole aisles in the pharmacy and grocery store dedicated to cold and flu remedies.

    Endemic doesn’t mean we don’t have waves. Mosquitos are endemic and the come in predictable seasonal waves that we just deal with. What makes Covid so difficult is the unpredictability of it and how we can get slammed repeatedly seemingly out of nowhere.

  3. 3.

    Kent

    January 3, 2022 at 12:06 pm

    @Roger Moore: If you spend any time in the right wing fever swamp cess pool, you quickly realize that everything to do with Covid is actually a conspiracy theory.  So mask mandates in your public schools are just the first shots in a massive plot for black helicopter left-wing takeover of the US by Bill Gates and the UN.  That is why they must be resisted.

    There is no arguing with that sort of diseased mentality.  Trust me.  It isn’t even so much pro-Covid as it is simply delusional.

  4. 4.

    Litlebritdifrnt

    January 3, 2022 at 12:07 pm

    Mike (@questauthority) is good people and a whole bunch of fun to read. He’s a pal of mine from the birther days. If Marge does file a lawsuit, his take will be hilarious. Oh and she was also suspended from Facebook today, unfortunately just for 24 hours though.

    As far as the pandemic goes I’m with John on this, staying in the house and only going out when absolutely necessary is just fine by me. I am triple vaxed and wear a mask if I do need to venture out, having said that I have recently discovered the joys of online grocery delivery, and take out delivery, so I can stay holed up for the duration if need be.

  5. 5.

    cain

    January 3, 2022 at 12:11 pm

    @Kent: It also has symptoms that can last a life time, can completely gut the hospital system, and spreads life wildfire.

    I suppose eventually when or if Republicans take charge they have to suddenly be the adults. I wonder what they would do after all that demagoguery? Most of this country is still sane and are not the crazy 20%.

  6. 6.

    Matt McIrvin

    January 3, 2022 at 12:11 pm

    @Roger Moore: It’s to Republicans’ social/political advantage for COVID to be a scourge forever, in that it means they can drive Democrats out of public spaces just by being in them. As long as they can prevent public mandates from happening, they get to live in the world while we remain holed up at home, terrified of their physical presence. It inhibits political participation, social participation, education, everything. Just deciding to ignore and tolerate the risk of illness and death is a kind of superpower. It’s the same logic as open carry of firearms.

    just as long as it doesn’t kill enough of them to destroy voting majorities (and if the US becomes less democratic that maybe becomes less of a problem anyway).

  7. 7.

    Brachiator

    January 3, 2022 at 12:15 pm

    To start, let’s be clear about what endemicity is, and isn’t. Endemicity doesn’t mean that there will be no more infections, let alone illnesses and deaths. It also doesn’t mean that future infections will cause milder illness than they do now. Simply put, it indicates that immunity and infections will have reached a steady state. Not enough people will be immune to deny the virus a host. Not enough people will be vulnerable to spark widespread outbreaks…

    Just as lay people were wrong about when and how we would reach herd immunity, lay people are pointlessly trying to predict what endemic Covid will look like. And yeah, some experts were wrong as well.

    Experts noted that the virus would evolve. I don’t think anyone accurately predicted how the Omicron variant would spread and infect people.

    Yeah, it is probably that Covid will become endemic.  But what that might look like is uncertain.

    And the wild card, in the US and other countries, is the stubborn amount of Covid denial, and how that might affect the future spread of the disease.

    It is crazy, but true, that conservatives seem willing to accept a certain level of illness and death in order to be “free” to walk around and spread the disease.

    These people are not willing to consider mitigation efforts. Getting back to normal means doing nothing.

  8. 8.

    Suzanne

    January 3, 2022 at 12:17 pm

    I remember back in March/April 2020 thinking that the only way we would actually get people to comply with public health measures was with a major wealth transfer from older to younger, as older people were more at risk from the virus and dependent on younger people to be compliant. It’s a viewpoint with some pretty nasty implications, namely that younger people (lower but not zero risk) wouldn’t be compliant without being directly incentivized. But I think I was right.

  9. 9.

    Matt McIrvin

    January 3, 2022 at 12:17 pm

    @cain: 

    I suppose eventually when or if Republicans take charge they have to suddenly be the adults.

    When did that ever happen? Certainly not after 2016.

  10. 10.

    Matt McIrvin

    January 3, 2022 at 12:20 pm

    @Brachiator:

    It is crazy, but true, that conservatives seem willing to accept a certain level of illness and death in order to be “free” to walk around and spread the disease.

    Everyone accepts that to some degree, or else nobody would leave their home ever. The stunning thing is just how cheap they think lives are.

  11. 11.

    OGLiberal

    January 3, 2022 at 12:20 pm

    As in noted in a Christmas thread my family of four got COVID for Christmas. We have not tested but I can’t see it being anything else. Brief, unplanned interaction with irresponsible (vaccinated but sick and not wearing a mask) neighbor was the likely cause. We’re 10-days in and my wife still feels horrible with a low-grade fever. Kids mostly better but son has a lingering cough. I have a more mild lingering cough but have fatigue like never before. Even the “it’s just the cold” Omicron variant sucks. We were probably more careful and vigilant than most people we know or interact with but didn’t stop us from getting it. As long as people are irresponsible, selfish assholes this thing isn’t going to get much better. Just don’t know how you stop people from being irresponsible, selfish assholes.

  12. 12.

    germy

    January 3, 2022 at 12:27 pm

    Seinfeld Today: Elaine spends six hours in a testing line, Jerry finds his new girlfriend less attractive with a mask off, George attends an anti-vax rally so he can get "super-immunity," and Kramer hoards rapid tests.

    — Andy Zou (@YoAndyZou) January 1, 2022

  13. 13.

    Yarrow

    January 3, 2022 at 12:29 pm

    “We should have been trying, from a very early stage, to teach people how to do risk calculation and harm reduction,” says Amesh Adalja, a physician and senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security.

    Covid is airborne. The WHO and CDC still don’t really acknowledge this fact, which means some ‘harm reduction’ options are not explained very well nor are they implemented as much as they should be. It’s hard for the average person to calculate risk when people in charge aren’t explaining how the virus is spread. Ventilation and filtration are key to clean the air/ dilute the amount of virus in the air and masks work on a personal level to keep the virus from spreading.

    I have seen some public health people come around to recognizing that Covid is airborne but not enough people at the policy-setting level are doing so. If we want to stop/slow/prevent the spread of it  and help people make correct risk assessments we need large scale recognition of airborne transmission and mitigations to prevent it.

  14. 14.

    Amir Khalid

    January 3, 2022 at 12:30 pm

    @Matt McIrvin:

    Not since Eisenhower, I reckon.

  15. 15.

    Suzanne

    January 3, 2022 at 12:31 pm

    @OGLiberal:

    Just don’t know how you stop people from being irresponsible, selfish assholes. 

    One of the best ways we know how to develop empathy is to read novels. It seems that the practice of climbing into someone else’s viewpoint carries over into real life. Also, we know that having personal relationships with people different from us is effective at this, as well, which is probably why (IMHO) we see cities having more left-leaning populations than rural areas.

    As for how to get people to be responsible…. we sucked at incentivizing people. The public health people seemed to think that people would just do what they needed to do, and they thought that because I bet most public health people are mature and responsible and concerned about others. But they failed to understand sparrows and curtain rods, and that there would need to be tangible rewards in order to get people to comply.

  16. 16.

    Suzanne

    January 3, 2022 at 12:32 pm

    @Yarrow: Glad to see you back ’round these parts.

  17. 17.

    oldster

    January 3, 2022 at 12:33 pm

    Great to hear Hilzoy’s voice again. I used to read her at Obsidian Wings. So smart.

    I guess I should seek her out — follow her twitter, or something.

  18. 18.

    Matt McIrvin

    January 3, 2022 at 12:35 pm

    @Yarrow: The guidelines on masking are still influenced by the situation in spring 2020, when really good masks were in short supply and desperately needed for medical workers, so the general public had to be actively dissuaded from hoarding them. Now, they’re easier to get, but the messaging hasn’t changed as much as it should have.

  19. 19.

    Another Scott

    January 3, 2022 at 12:35 pm

    Relatedly, STATNews from February 2020:

    Just another coronavirus

    2019-nCoV joins the four coronaviruses now circulating in people. “I can imagine a scenario where this becomes a fifth endemic human coronavirus,” said Stephen Morse of Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, an epidemiologist and expert on emerging infectious diseases. “We don’t pay much attention to them because they’re so mundane,” especially compared to seasonal flu.

    Although little-known outside health care and virology circles, the current four “are already part of the winter-spring seasonal landscape of respiratory disease,” Adalja said. Two of them, OC43 and 229E, were discovered in the 1960s but had circulated in cows and bats, respectively, for centuries. The others, HKU1 and NL63, were discovered after the 2003-2004 SARS outbreak, also after circulating in animals. It’s not known how long they’d existed in people before scientists noticed, but since they jumped from animals to people before the era of virology, it isn’t known whether that initial jump triggered widespread disease.

    OC43 and 229E are more prevalent than other endemic human coronaviruses, especially in children and the elderly. Together, the four are responsible for an estimated one-quarter of all colds. “For the most part they cause common-cold-type symptoms,” said Richard Webby, an influenza expert at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. “Maybe that is the most likely end scenario if this thing becomes entrenched.”

    All four, in particular HKU1, can cause pneumonia, and sometimes death. It is rare enough that researchers do not have good estimates of its prevalence or virulence, but two of the others have been better studied. In one of the few close looks at OC43 and 229E, researchers measured their infection rates during four winters (1999-2003) in Rochester, N.Y., among 2,897 healthy outpatients, adults with cardiopulmonary disease, and patients hospitalized with acute respiratory illnesses.

    They identified 398 coronavirus infections (four people had both OC43 or 229E). Infection rates ran from 0.5% among healthy elderly adults to 15% among healthy young adults (where “healthy” means they had no viral symptoms), with the highest rates coming in the winter of 2000-2001, for no obvious reason — suggesting that coronavirus infection rates will rise and fall unpredictably, much like seasonal flu, and that its consequences will also be similar: some serious illness, some mild, and a lot of asymptomatic infections.

    […]

    We can and will eventually learn to live with it. But we should not let up now on doing everything we can to crush community spread here and everywhere else around the world.

    The mRNA vaccines are still amazing and an important component in the fight and need to be available everywhere. The nasal vaccines are important as well, and I hope their promise pans out.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  20. 20.

    Roger Moore

    January 3, 2022 at 12:37 pm

    @Suzanne:

    One of the best ways we know how to develop empathy is to read novels. It seems that the practice of climbing into someone else’s viewpoint carries over into real life.

    Which is exactly why Conservatives are so eager to keep kids from reading novels that involve the POV of anyone who isn’t white and straight.

  21. 21.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    January 3, 2022 at 12:38 pm

    @Brachiator:Experts noted that the virus would evolve. I don’t think anyone accurately predicted how the Omicron variant would spread and infect people.

    The last thing like COVID was the 1918 pandemic and they barely knew what a virus was back then muchless being able to track mutations. But there was a third wave in 1920 that resembled Omicron as in highly contagious but much more mild. In my ill informed opinion I think we will see two more mutations this year and by 2023 it will be a non issue.

  22. 22.

    Roger Moore

    January 3, 2022 at 12:40 pm

    @oldster:

    If you’re on Twitter, you should definitely be following @hilzoy.

  23. 23.

    Brachiator

    January 3, 2022 at 12:40 pm

    @Matt McIrvin:

    RE: It is crazy, but true, that conservatives seem willing to accept a certain level of illness and death in order to be “free” to walk around and spread the disease.

    Everyone accepts that to some degree, or else nobody would leave their home ever. The stunning thing is just how cheap they think lives are.

    This is different. Conservatives are not simply talking about acceptable risk, they are doing the denial dance. I see Marco Rubio insisting that Covid is just a bad cold.

    In both the UK and US, crazy right wingers are claiming that if you are healthy and fit, and have a good immune system, you can avoid Covid.

    So conservatives are accepting deaths that could easily be prevented.  They are betting that they will be OK, and it is just somebody else who will die.

    And a recent past column in Reason, the libertarian rag, acknowledged that vaccines work, but that people had a right to refuse vaccines because “liberty” and instead embrace death.

    “Freedom” and “liberty” and “personal responsibility” is the new God’s Will.

  24. 24.

    Brachiator

    January 3, 2022 at 12:42 pm

    @Enhanced Voting Techniques:

    The last thing like COVID was the 1918 pandemic and they barely knew what a virus was back then muchless being able to track mutations. But there was a third wave in 1920 that resembled Omicron as in highly contagious but much more mild.

    Some people assume that Covid must behave much like the 1918 flu virus. It ain’t necessarily so.

  25. 25.

    Roger Moore

    January 3, 2022 at 12:43 pm

    @Matt McIrvin:

    Really good masks are still is maddeningly short supply.  I was looking to order some KF94 masks for an immunocompromised friend, and they’re all back ordered.

  26. 26.

    RSA

    January 3, 2022 at 12:43 pm

    @Yarrow:

    “We should have been trying, from a very early stage, to teach people how to do risk calculation and harm reduction,” says Amesh Adalja, a physician and senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security.

    I’m just piggybacking here: Adalja is totally naive.  Risk calculation means reasoning about probabilities, and even physicians who have been taught to do so in college and medical school still screw it up. There’s no chance we could teach the general public how to do risk calculation.  “Do this and don’t do that” is the closest we can get, in my opinion.

  27. 27.

    different-church-lady

    January 3, 2022 at 12:44 pm

    @Matt McIrvin:

    The stunning thing is just how cheap they think other lives are.

  28. 28.

    Yarrow

    January 3, 2022 at 12:44 pm

    @Suzanne:  Thank you.

    @Matt McIrvin:  This is very true and guidance on masks should have changed a long time ago. However, the original guidance was also based on droplet transmission, which is not how Covid is transmitted. Aerosol transmission requires different mitigations, including better masks. Also, places like classrooms should not only have filtration of some sort but also should have CO2 monitors to help teachers assess risk during the day.

  29. 29.

    Suzanne

    January 3, 2022 at 12:44 pm

    @Roger Moore:

    Which is exactly why Conservatives are so eager to keep kids from reading novels that involve the POV of anyone who isn’t white and straight. 

    Absolutely. There’s also a strong correlation between intelligence and reading, and I would be willing to posit that this link is related to the “liberals are smarter/more educated” things that circulate in election years.

  30. 30.

    germy

    January 3, 2022 at 12:45 pm

    Rules are for the little people.

    JUST IN: Donald Trump Jr. and Ivanka Trump refuse to comply with subpoenas issued by the New York State attorney general’s office as it conducts a civil investigation into the way the family real estate business valued its holdings. https://t.co/REXNYsig5F h/t @AaronKatersky

    — Evan McMurry (@evanmcmurry) January 3, 2022

  31. 31.

    Suzanne

    January 3, 2022 at 12:48 pm

    @different-church-lady: Oh, they think their own lives are valuable and others’ lives are expendable.

    I remember reading some time back that most people are stupidly optimistic. They’ll hear, “90% of people who do XXX will have a bad outcome,”, and at least half of the people who hear that will think, “Man, that sucks for all those other guys!”. I am sure that that optimism has some sort of evolutionary benefit, but I am also sure that it is stupid and that the more intelligent one is, the more one is risk-averse.

  32. 32.

    Suzanne

    January 3, 2022 at 12:49 pm

    @RSA:

    There’s no chance we could teach the general public how to do risk calculation.  “Do this and don’t do that” is the closest we can get, in my opinion. 

    The best we could have done is, “We’ll pay you to do the thing we want you to do”. Incentives.

  33. 33.

    Ken

    January 3, 2022 at 12:51 pm

    @Enhanced Voting Techniques:  In my ill informed opinion I think we will see two more mutations this year and by 2023 it will be a non issue.

    The first or “sigma” mutation being the one that escapes the vaccines, and the second or “omega” mutation being the one that also kills 99.83% of cases?  That would make it a non-issue.

  34. 34.

    Yarrow

    January 3, 2022 at 12:52 pm

    @RSA:  Agreed. However, at a general level it’s possible to do some risk calculation. Like, small rooms, closed doors, close proximity to others, no ventilation is higher risk for Covid transmission than outside and distanced. That kind of thing. Wear a mask in a first scenario, your risk drops. Have a HEPA filter your risk drops again. Window open, another drop. Those are just generalities but I’ve been applying that sort of on-the-go risk analysis to situations and environments since February 2020.

  35. 35.

    Brachiator

    January 3, 2022 at 12:53 pm

    @RSA:

    There’s no chance we could teach the general public how to do risk calculation. “Do this and don’t do that” is the closest we can get, in my opinion.

    Very true.

    Also, conservatives and the libertarian fringe talk about risk as a philosophical concept. “In a free society, people should accept risk.”

    This has nothing to do with actually estimating risk.

  36. 36.

    Roger Moore

    January 3, 2022 at 12:53 pm

    @germy:

    This sounds like typical Trump behavior.  The first step is to stall for as long as possible.  They try to make stuff so awful for the other side that they’re willing to settle.  Even if that doesn’t work, they manage to stall and stay out of trouble for as long as possible.  The courts need to recognize the pattern and go to sanctions much faster for perennial problem cases like the Trumps.

  37. 37.

    RSA

    January 3, 2022 at 12:54 pm

    @Suzanne:

    The best we could have done is, “We’ll pay you to do the thing we want you to do”. Incentives.

    You’re right. Positive and negative incentives are an improvement over plain rules.

  38. 38.

    Yarrow

    January 3, 2022 at 12:55 pm

    @Suzanne: Paying people to get the vaccine didn’t work very well from what I’ve read.

  39. 39.

    MisterForkbeard

    January 3, 2022 at 12:58 pm

    @germy: We’ve seen  this for awhile, haven’t we? Just a complete refusal by the rightwing to operate by rules or to adhere to actual law.

  40. 40.

    Yarrow

    January 3, 2022 at 12:59 pm

    For those that don’t know about the Corsi/Rosenthal box (box fan filter), here’s a link to directions on how to make one and a bunch of other info. If your kid’s classroom doesn’t have good filtration, the Corsi/Rosenthal box is a cost-effective way to clean the air and make their classrooms healthier.  They are so easy to make that  kids can do it.

  41. 41.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    January 3, 2022 at 1:03 pm

    @Ken: And you could get bit by a bat, not notice it and get rabies, which is a virus with a 100% lethality rate, if you just want to scare the shit outyourself.

  42. 42.

    Sure Lurkalot

    January 3, 2022 at 1:03 pm

    @Suzanne: There were many cases of tangible rewards in my state…cash lotteries by the state and grocers, gift cards, $100 bills, etc. The initial roll-out of the vaccines was rocky in terms of getting an appointment but by April, the bottleneck loosened and there were pop up locations and events staged everywhere.

    We have about 65% of our population vaccinated and it has been at that level for months. Apparently, no amount of carrots will work on the 35%.

    So, the 65% are forced to risk manage as best they can. Because at least in my state, the governor will not impose mandates of any kind.

    Like Matt said above, very much like open carry. You don’t like guns in Target? Too bad.

  43. 43.

    Kent

    January 3, 2022 at 1:03 pm

    I suppose eventually when or if Republicans take charge they have to suddenly be the adults.

    They are in charge in a whole bunch of states.  How is that working out?

  44. 44.

    Suzanne

    January 3, 2022 at 1:04 pm

    @Yarrow: We needed to pay people to mask, to social distance, to minimize trips, to move church services outdoors, etc. A lot of the vaccine incentives were pretty effective, given that they were pretty small (like $50 or your name in a drawing or free donuts or whatever).

  45. 45.

    Kent

    January 3, 2022 at 1:04 pm

    @Enhanced Voting Techniques: Except that we do have an effective rabies vaccine.

  46. 46.

    Fair Economist

    January 3, 2022 at 1:04 pm

    To emphasize what several others have said, endemic does NOT mean minor or inconsequential. It just means stable transmission over the long term. Smallpox was endemic, back when it caused 1/3 of all deaths. Endemic COVID is not going to be as bad as smallpox, but it’s going to be a lot worse than the common cold coronaviruses.

  47. 47.

    Felanius Kootea

    January 3, 2022 at 1:07 pm

    @Roger Moore: It’s weird.  I watched Don’t Look Up on Netflix after reading all the caustic reviews from professional film critics and ended up thinking that it was as much about our inability to tackle COVID-19 (or any major problem) because of deliberately cultivated polarization as about our failure to adequately address climate change.

  48. 48.

    Felanius Kootea

    January 3, 2022 at 1:09 pm

    @Kent: See the Florida surgeon general’s speech on the need to wind down a culture of COVID-19 testing just as omicron surges. Amazing (in the worst possible way).

  49. 49.

    West of the Rockies

    January 3, 2022 at 1:13 pm

    My take is that in the last week there has been an observable shift or new awareness in the mainstream media (NPR, CNN, etc) that the 1/6 events are super serious.   NPR has had a story up for days about the generals warning us about ’22 and beyond.

    Marjorie Three Names getting banned is also good.

    Let’s hope the Dems can pass a voting rights bill with teeth.

  50. 50.

    lollipopguild

    January 3, 2022 at 1:14 pm

    @Roger Moore: Some of these people never want covid to end. They want to endlessly bellyache and have an endless excuse to play the victim.

  51. 51.

    James E Powell

    January 3, 2022 at 1:16 pm

    @cain:

    I suppose eventually when or if Republicans take charge they have to suddenly be the adults. I wonder what they would do after all that demagoguery?

    Republicans took charge in 2002 & 2016; nothing changed. Demagoguery from ignorant, hateful bigots increased both times.

  52. 52.

    topclimber

    January 3, 2022 at 1:19 pm

    @Yarrow: I am a big believer that innumeracy is rampant. But most folks can grasp the concept of playing the odds.

    Part of the problem is that the odds change as the virus mutates.  What was possibly “good enough” pre-Delta won’t cut if now.

  53. 53.

    jeffreyw

    January 3, 2022 at 1:22 pm

    @Felanius Kootea: Yeah.  You and me and Kevin.

  54. 54.

    smith

    January 3, 2022 at 1:25 pm

    @Suzanne: Positive incentives to vaccinate may have helped get people who were squishy on vaxxing to do it somewhat earlier than they would have otherwise, but I don’t think they helped with people whose attitudes hardened as anti-vaxxing became a tribal signifier. The two states I recall having state-wide incentive programs — OH and WV — are now at the lower end of vax rates.

    What has worked better with holdouts are negative incentives (mandates, increased insurance costs). With the exception of the police, most groups subjected to mandates so far have shown compliance rates at or above 95%. In some ways it’s easier for a Goober to save face if they can tell themselves they got vaxxed to avoid a serious consequence like a job loss than because of a trivial reward like a free donut.

    As for a transfer of wealth from the older to the younger, the age profile of covid deaths means we’ve had a program of accelerated inheritance for almost 2 years now, with the opposite potential incentivization you propose. It might not have a huge effect on individuals (no one likes to lose their grandma),  but there certainly has led to speculation about possible Social Security and Medicare cost savings from so many Olds being removed from the population.

  55. 55.

    Soprano2

    January 3, 2022 at 1:25 pm

    @Matt McIrvin:  As long as they can prevent public mandates from happening, they get to live in the world while we remain holed up at home, terrified of their physical presence. It inhibits political participation, social participation, education, everything. Just deciding to ignore and tolerate the risk of illness and death is a kind of superpower.

    Speaking for myself, I won’t allow them to have this power over me. Everything you do has a risk. Driving in your car to get takeout has a risk of death. Walking down stairs has a risk. We’ve all lived with the risk of getting a serious illness at one time or another. My mother got regular pneumonia even though she rarely went anywhere. Life itself is a risk! Being triple vaxxed and living as if you have never gotten even one shot is a choice you are making, not something that’s been forced on you by anti-vaxxers.

  56. 56.

    gene108

    January 3, 2022 at 1:29 pm

    “We should have been trying, from a very early stage, to teach people how to do risk calculation and harm reduction,” says Amesh Adalja, a physician and senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security.

    Dr. Adalja needs to get out of his academic bubble and understand that even reasonably well educated people are willing to take outsized risks, because of an imagined future reward.

    One example he might’ve of run across are other educated professionals who take outsized financial risks during economic booms, because they only see the easy money to be made, with no sense if or when the good times will end. The engineer, accountant, etc., who went into flipping houses in 2004 and 2005, only to get burned in 2006.

    For most people, if they can’t see risk as a physical manifestation, like a lion about to pounce at you, trying to figure out your personal danger is incredibly difficult. Whether it’s in regards to financial or business deals or good hygiene to prevent the spread of germs pre-COVID, there have always been people who live in a state of denial regarding the downside to the risks they take.

  57. 57.

    Matt McIrvin

    January 3, 2022 at 1:30 pm

    @Felanius Kootea: I’ve been avoiding “Don’t Look Up” because I don’t think I need an analogical fable for things I’ve been watching closely in literal form for years.

    And also because the notion of an extraterrestrial impact threat is also a real thing, aside from being a metaphor for something else, and I expect the treatment of it as a literal science-fiction subject to be distractingly bad, though maybe that is unfair.

    I did once have the idea that an interesting angle on the asteroid story would be to have an impact that was predicted to wipe out a particular city on a particular date decades in the future, and have stories about how that affected all sorts of people–including real estate speculators, developers, insurance agents, etc. There’s an effort to prevent the impact entirely–but how does that affect everyone who was making real-estate bets on the disaster actually happening? It maybe becomes a science-fiction Glengarry Glen Ross.

    But eventually I realized I was just imagining a story about global warming in south Florida. If you want to write that story, I figured, just write that story.

  58. 58.

    Betty

    January 3, 2022 at 1:30 pm

    @oldster: Yes, you should follow her on Twitter. Always something insghtful to say.

  59. 59.

    SFBayAreaGal

    January 3, 2022 at 1:31 pm

    I haven’t seen Martin post for some time. Has Martin stopped posting?

  60. 60.

    Bruce K in ATH-GR

    January 3, 2022 at 1:33 pm

    Talk of the deplatforming of that Congressplaguerat reminds me: on this day in 1946, wartime radio propagandist William Joyce was deplatformed at Wandsworth Prison in London, England.

    May the deplatforming of Lord Haw-Haw be a harbinger to his political heirs in the 21st century.

  61. 61.

    Soprano2

    January 3, 2022 at 1:34 pm

    @Kent: Well, in my state they’re forcing schools to drop mask mandates and other mitigation measures because of a Cole County judge’s ruling. It’s not a good thing.

  62. 62.

    gene108

    January 3, 2022 at 1:34 pm

    @Soprano2:

    Being triple vaxxed and living as if you have never gotten even one shot is a choice you are making, not something that’s been forced on you by anti-vaxxers.

    I’m a transplant recipient. There are millions of immunocompromised people in this country, who have to act like we did in 2020, because of the maskless unvaccinated people thinking everything’s fine.

    I’m vaccinated and boostered, but I have no idea what kind of immune response I’d be able to mount, so I’m extra careful.

  63. 63.

    The Dangerman

    January 3, 2022 at 1:35 pm

    @West of the Rockies: The Right is convinced that 2022 will be a bloodbath for Democrats and it may well be. If Voting Rights passes and people actually vote (more voters generally means good news for Democrats), they might be in for a surprise…

    …given that they have told overweight people that healthy people don’t die from Covid so too bad for you, Bubba, and old people have been told too bad for you, too,  and on and on. I’m not saying Democrats hold the House but it might be close.

  64. 64.

    RSA

    January 3, 2022 at 1:35 pm

    @Yarrow:  Yes, that’s good—helping people make better-informed qualitative judgments.

    @Brachiator:

    Also, conservatives and the libertarian fringe talk about risk as a philosophical concept. “In a free society, people should accept risk.”

    This has nothing to do with actually estimating risk.

    Ugh. Exactly. I’ve seen anti-vax memes going around with a line something like, “We understand the risk; we just choose live with it.”  But of course, they don’t understand the risk in the sense of being able to estimate it.

  65. 65.

    Soprano2

    January 3, 2022 at 1:37 pm

    @Suzanne: A lot of the vaccine incentives were pretty effective

    To a point I found this to be true, but only to a point. My employer, a city government, did everything they could – special leave time if you got Covid or had to isolate or had side effects from the shots so you didn’t have to use your sick time, gift cards for the first shot and a day off with pay for the second shot, special clinics for employees to get the shot. Last I saw 55% of employees were fully vaccinated, which tracks with the percentage of people in this country who are also fully vaccinated. It seems that the people who were going to do it anyway took the incentives, but it didn’t motivate anyone who didn’t want to do it. I think making employees wear masks in the office if they’re unvaccinated has gotten at least two people I work with to get vaccinated.

  66. 66.

    gene108

    January 3, 2022 at 1:41 pm

    @topclimber:

    I am a big believer that innumeracy is rampant. But most folks can grasp the concept of playing the odds.

    Part of human nature is that if a person wants something badly enough, the risks be damned. The person’s going to do it.

    It doesn’t matter how careful the person is in other aspects of life.

  67. 67.

    Soprano2

    January 3, 2022 at 1:41 pm

    @gene108: Number one, I’m not talking about anyone in a situation like yours. Number two, I think even if we had reached 90% vaccination rates nationwide you’d still have to be extra careful. How did you handle the situation before Covid happened?

  68. 68.

    Matt McIrvin

    January 3, 2022 at 1:42 pm

    @Soprano2:

    Speaking for myself, I won’t allow them to have this power over me. Everything you do has a risk. Driving in your car to get takeout has a risk of death. Walking down stairs has a risk.

    Yes, but how much of a risk? I prefer to have these things expressed quantitatively.

    Right now, it appears that the risk of death from COVID for the typical triple-vaxxed person is close to the airline-disaster range–actually low enough to discount. But other things are extremely uncertain, such as the real degree of risk of getting permanent, subtle brain or circulatory damage, or a debilitating chronic-fatigue disorder that seriously affects quality of life. Using good masks in public and avoiding indoor dining until the numbers come down seems like a good idea.

  69. 69.

    Brachiator

    January 3, 2022 at 1:43 pm

    @smith:

    but there certainly has led to speculation about possible Social Security and Medicare cost savings from so many Olds being removed from the population.

    I have not yet seen any systematic study of the economic impact of Covid on the US economy, focusing on people age 65.

    And it is certainly not clear whether there is a net cost savings.

    Some of the factors:

    Number of people who took early retirement, including those who get Social Security benefits.

    Medical care costs for those age 65 and over who survived Covid, including those who may suffer from Long Covid.

    Number of people age 65 and over who died from Covid who were receiving Social Security benefits (out of a total of about 590,000 people)

  70. 70.

    Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes

    January 3, 2022 at 1:49 pm

    Hilzoy can suck it. I’ve now lost my Barbados trip over the the thing, and my current mental state is one where I’ve done everything I was expected to, took catastrophic financial losses and want antivax pundits, antivax pols red state antivax gomers to die choking in puddles of their own phlegm.

    Done – let them thought and prayer their way through a ventilator.

  71. 71.

    Suzanne

    January 3, 2022 at 1:49 pm

    @Soprano2:

    It seems that the people who were going to do it anyway took the incentives, but it didn’t motivate anyone who didn’t want to do it. 

    No, they weren’t good enough. Incentives can be carrots or sticks, but for the people who really need convincing, the carrots needed to be really, really good, or the sticks really, really sharp. And, no, not everyone would comply, but I think we would have stood a better chance, before the utter obstinacy really set in.

    Shit, I was basically willing to punch a kitten to get the damn thing, and yet I know lots of other people who were just like, “Eh, I’ll get to it when I get around to it.”

  72. 72.

    Brachiator

    January 3, 2022 at 1:50 pm

    @gene108:

    For most people, if they can’t see risk as a physical manifestation, like a lion about to pounce at you, trying to figure out your personal danger is incredibly difficult.

    Great point. And I think that because people cannot see the virus attacking people, this adds to dismissal and denial.

    Imagine if Covid were like the plague, or even smallpox, with sores popping up on people, people dying suddenly in doorways or quickly at home.  We don’t see the people dying in hospitals. This makes it easier for dopes to minimize and to deny.

    We don’t see Covid pouncing, so it’s not seen as a great threat.

  73. 73.

    Gin & Tonic

    January 3, 2022 at 1:54 pm

    @gene108: Humans, in general, are very poor at risk calculation.

  74. 74.

    Matt McIrvin

    January 3, 2022 at 1:54 pm

    @Brachiator: In New York City in spring 2020, it was really pretty close to that.

    And guess what. In NYC they treat this more seriously than they do just about anywhere else in the US. Hasn’t kept them from all getting Omicron, but the deaths have been notably low in number this time.

  75. 75.

    Roger Moore

    January 3, 2022 at 1:54 pm

    @Matt McIrvin: ​
     

    But eventually I realized I was just imagining a story about global warming in south Florida. If you want to write that story, I figured, just write that story.

    This is 100% wrong. There’s a whole, large, and extremely important part of science fiction consisting of packaging contemporary events into SciFi allegory, and your proposed story would fit in perfectly.

  76. 76.

    James E Powell

    January 3, 2022 at 1:54 pm

    @Matt McIrvin:

    But eventually I realized I was just imagining a story about global warming in south Florida. If you want to write that story, I figured, just write that story.

    Have there been any good films about the consequences – the real ones – of global warming/climate change/whatever they will call it when it finally sinks in that it’s happening?

    I don’t mean extreme stuff like The Day After Tomorrow or Snowpiercer. I mean stories set in Florida & New York and the Chesapeake when sea levels rise six feet.

    Might make a good ten-episode Netflix series.

  77. 77.

    James E Powell

    January 3, 2022 at 1:57 pm

    @SFBayAreaGal:

    I haven’t seen Martin post for some time. Has Martin stopped posting?

    Last I heard, he was retiring. Hope he basking somewhere, doing or not doing whatever he wants.

  78. 78.

    Roger Moore

    January 3, 2022 at 1:57 pm

    @Brachiator:

    Also, conservatives and the libertarian fringe talk about risk as a philosophical concept. “In a free society, people should accept risk.”

    Which is their polite way of saying they should be allowed to do as they please, and you just have to live with the way it ruins your life.

  79. 79.

    Matt McIrvin

    January 3, 2022 at 1:57 pm

    @Roger Moore:

    This is 100% wrong. There’s a whole, large, and extremely important part of science fiction consisting of packaging contemporary events into SciFi allegory, and your proposed story would fit in perfectly.

    Yeah, I know, but I get wary of it. When it makes sense, it’s because there’s a reason not to tell the story straight. Beyond some point it’s no longer taboo to write a story about discrimination against black people so you don’t have to write it as a fable about discrimination against Venusians.

    Maybe in this case, analogizing global warming as a giant impact gets past some people’s resistance. But probably not when the discussion of what it’s really about is right out in the open.

  80. 80.

    Brachiator

    January 3, 2022 at 1:58 pm

    @Suzanne: ​
     

    RE: It seems that the people who were going to do it anyway took the incentives, but it didn’t motivate anyone who didn’t want to do it.

    No, they weren’t good enough.

    Incentives have not been working. Hell, people are willing to pay stupid amounts for fake vaccine cards and for other evasions.

    Anti-vaxx is a weird stubborn act of social defiance for some people, and even a game for others. They derive more satisfaction from defiance than they would get from any incentive.

  81. 81.

    Old Man Shadow

    January 3, 2022 at 1:58 pm

    My worries about transitioning from a pandemic to an endemic is that the number of human lives Republicans in power seem to want to write off to get back to “normal” is a lot fucking higher than the number anyone with any sort of conscience would want or agree to.

  82. 82.

    Kent

    January 3, 2022 at 2:00 pm

    A couple of days ago I drove my daughter from the Portland metro area out to Jackson WY for a ski resort job and then drove home.  So we crossed both Oregon and Idaho in the middle of blizzard.

    Astonishing to see the difference in Covid behavior in a red and blue state.  No one other than the servers at the Asian restaurant we ate at in Idaho Falls had masks on.  Everywhere else in Idaho was 100% mask-free and everything was open for business.  In Oregon, even in the bright red eastern 2./3 of the state that is as conservative as Idaho, people mostly followed the state’s mask rules even if grudgingly.

    Governance makes a huge difference.

  83. 83.

    Chetan Murthy

    January 3, 2022 at 2:02 pm

    @Soprano2: It’s clear you’re not interested in Long Covid.  But Long Covid is interested in you.  Until we actually have knowledge about the prevalence, severity, and kinds of Long Covid among the vaccinated, we’re all just gambling with (as Rummy put it) known unknowns.  And this isn’t the equivalent of “oh, the virus could mutate into a superkiller, but it might not, so until it does, I won’t live in fear of it.”  Long Covid is here, the vaccinated also suffer from it, and we simply don’t have the -data-.  It remains to do the data-gathering and analysis.

    Until that happens, pretending that you actually understand those risks is just fooling yourself.

  84. 84.

    Ohio Mom

    January 3, 2022 at 2:05 pm

    @SFBayAreaGal: As I read your comment, I became alarmed. You are right, Martin has vanished. Maybe there was a thread where he explained why he was exiting and both of us missed it? He made such informative comments.

    On the subject of this thread, there is no one left in my parents’ generation in my family. I carry around a list of questions I wished I had thought to ask, and the newest of these is how they managed their anxieties about all the communicable diseases they faced.

    My mother knew she would be nursing her children through measles, mumps, rubella, whooping cough and chicken pox, and seemed to take it in stride, even though she certainly knew how dangerous they could be. I am sure she worried about polio too until we were vaccinated as young children.

    I’m not saying we shouldn’t take measures to keep ourselves (and others) protected from Covid, I’m am wondering how to be reasonably braver.

  85. 85.

    Brachiator

    January 3, 2022 at 2:10 pm

    @Gin & Tonic:

    Humans, in general, are very poor at risk calculation.

    But just good enough to have survived for millions of years (including early hominins).

    And fortunately, most people have got the vaccine and want to get the vaccine.

  86. 86.

    jeepers

    January 3, 2022 at 2:12 pm

    The vaccines, which looked like the salvation of 2021, worked but weren’t enough to rescue us.

    This is not a true statement. The fault is not in our vaccines but in one of our political parties and people who write news articles should not be so afraid to point this out.

  87. 87.

    Baud

    January 3, 2022 at 2:13 pm

    @Ohio Mom: Martin showed up yesterday in one of the 20-year BJ anniversary threads.  But he has been posting less since he retired.

  88. 88.

    Suzanne

    January 3, 2022 at 2:15 pm

    @Brachiator:

    Incentives have not been working. Hell, people are willing to pay stupid amounts for fake vaccine cards and for other evasions.

     

    Some people are not going to be reached ever. But negative incentives, like getting to stay employed, have been pretty effective. If we had had better incentivization early, I think we could have avoided some of the utter hardening. Lies got halfway around the world before truth got its shoes on, or something.

  89. 89.

    Quinerly

    January 3, 2022 at 2:24 pm

    @germy: the entire thread is hilarious.

  90. 90.

    Brachiator

    January 3, 2022 at 2:27 pm

    @Ohio Mom:

    My mother knew she would be nursing her children through measles, mumps, rubella, whooping cough and chicken pox, and seemed to take it in stride, even though she certainly knew how dangerous they could be. I am sure she worried about polio too until we were vaccinated as young children.

    For a time, before good public sanitation and the invention of vaccines, smallpox, yellow fever, measles, etc were regular scourges.  I am not sure that people took it in stride, but they had to live with it. And often this meant that they had 10 or more kids, with hopefully a good number surviving.

    It sometimes seems like a simple thing, but in the advanced nations, people can reliably use birth control and still be reasonably certain that any children they choose to have will survive and not have to worry about diseases which could wipe out entire households.

  91. 91.

    WaterGirl

    January 3, 2022 at 2:28 pm

    @Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: You don’t seem to understand that it’s not just “them” who are being negatively impacted by Covid.

    To read this from Hilzoy

    “I’ve been fighting the Nazis for two whole years, giving up my entire social life in the process. I’ve done my bit. If some people, like Jews and gays are worried, that’s on them.”

    … and respond with anything that resembles I don’t care, I want to get back to normal seems to indicate a huge sense of entitlement.

    shorter:  “Fuck everybody else, this is inconvenient for me.”

  92. 92.

    WaterGirl

    January 3, 2022 at 2:37 pm

    @Ohio Mom: @SFBayAreaGal:

    Not to worry, Martin last commented on New Year’s Eve.

  93. 93.

    trollhattan

    January 3, 2022 at 2:38 pm

    @Another Scott:

    You’re right, of course. The vaccines were presented years ahead of what was predicted early 2020 and had they been embraced by everybody, we’d be in good shape today. My bluish county is mired at about 62% fully vaccinated and there’s virtually no excuse for that. I can only imagine what the percentage is in Wichita Falls.

  94. 94.

    germy

    January 3, 2022 at 2:39 pm

    @Quinerly:

    I always figured Kramer would be the anti-vaxxer, while George would be the one hoarding tests.

  95. 95.

    Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

    January 3, 2022 at 2:40 pm

    @Suzanne:

    Wasn’t this tried already and it didn’t work? Incentives were decried by conservatives as “bribes” or something

  96. 96.

    Matt McIrvin

    January 3, 2022 at 2:41 pm

    @James E Powell: I think Kim Stanley Robinson’s “Washington trilogy” was trying to do this, but I haven’t read it.

    It’s an incidental detail in some stories, like the flooded Manhattan in the movie “A.I.” Not treated in much detail or with great concern for accuracy.

    The problem of course is that people do want to go for the dramatic apocalypse or global dystopia story, rather than realistic tales of people struggling with big but graspable problems on a regional level. But I could see a modern writer in the vein of Michener or Arthur Hailey writing a sweeping cast-of-thousands epic about it.

    (I was going to say Brunner, but he already did global environmental disaster in the apocalyptic style.)

  97. 97.

    Felanius Kootea

    January 3, 2022 at 2:43 pm

    @jeffreyw: Cool! It was so obvious to me that it wasn’t just about climate change – if I hadn’t read the critiques before watching, climate change wouldn’t even have crossed my mind.

  98. 98.

    Feathers

    January 3, 2022 at 2:43 pm

    @Suzanne: Incentives don’t really work either. I worked at an organ bank and one of the things I learned is that if you start paying people to do altruistic things, you may get some greedheads you wouldn’t have previously, but you lose most of the altruistic donors. It ends up being a large net loss. People who are altruistic do things out of goodness and are insulted by the offer of money. In fact, they are likely to choose not to to the thing.

    Economic models assume everyone has a price, and this is not the case.

  99. 99.

    jeepers

    January 3, 2022 at 2:44 pm

    That Wired article is based on the false premise that there is some unified “we” that is going to collectively make these hard decisions and cooperate to make them work. That is not going to happen in this country. The situation has calcified to the point that no solution requiring the slightest effort or sacrifice by the majority of Americans will work.

  100. 100.

    Feathers

    January 3, 2022 at 2:49 pm

    @trollhattan: I get so frustrated when people complain about the vaccines not working. Vaccines require a certain percentage of the population to be vaccinated for full effectiveness. We should be talking about Republican sabotage of the recovery effort, not that Biden has failed in controlling the pandemic.

    Republicans: If you keep blaming the Democrats when bad things happen, we’ll keep making bad things happen.

  101. 101.

    Felanius Kootea

    January 3, 2022 at 2:50 pm

    @Matt McIrvin: Hey – I learned from Don’t Look Up that there’s actually a Planetary Defense Coordination Office (thanks Obama)!

    It’s worth watching once. And stay through the end credits.

  102. 102.

    Argiope

    January 3, 2022 at 2:55 pm

    @smith: In my county in OH, Medicaid recipients are being offered $100 gift cards to get vaccinated regardless of age.  This has been a really big draw to the health department where I volunteer as a vaccinator–I’d say easily half of our shots are going into the arms of people who have heard about this and are taking the logistical/transportational/organizational steps to get to us and get the shot.  None are hardened anti-vaxxers, but $100 is real money to poor folks and helps overcome inertia. It will be interesting to see data rather than just my anecdata on this, if it becomes available.

  103. 103.

    Matt McIrvin

    January 3, 2022 at 2:56 pm

    @Chetan Murthy: It does seem (and I know we talked about this elsewhere) as if there’s a weird small contingent of people who are playing up long COVID way beyond the data, insisting that the vaccines do nothing or even that asymptomatic people are more likely to get it. Right now, I agree they’re pretty marginal, but they’re worth keeping an eye on. There just isn’t enough real information, especially for omicron, and the vacuum gets filled with odd things.

  104. 104.

    Suzanne

    January 3, 2022 at 2:57 pm

    @Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): Incentives can be both positive and negative, and there’s been a patchwork of them. Some of them have worked better than others. There’s a lot of research indicating that incentives can change behaviors, within limits. Nothing is going to get the most dug-in people to do what you want them to do. But I think much of the trouble we had was that some people (like me and my family) were absolutely doing everything we could do to get the damn vaccine, and would have paid a significant amount to do it. Other people sat back and waited until they got something for it, and others are hardcore refusing. The mushy middle may have been more persuadable to get their shots earlier if they had what they considered a better reason to get out there sooner, and it didn’t become a liberal-vs-conservative thing. For the record, a vaccine mandate is an incentive, travel through an airport is an incentive, a lower insurance premium is an incentive.

  105. 105.

    Quinerly

    January 3, 2022 at 2:57 pm

    @germy: I totally see Kramer hoarding tests… And the wrong tests at that. I think there was a hoarding episode. George is too lazy to hoard. ?

    Some of the comments in that thread have the show dead to rights. Elaine coughing, Elaine and Putty giving it back and forth to each other. The episodes just write themselves. A good friend and l over the weekend were laughing about old episodes. We did a “what if it was updated during Covid times.” He actually came up with Jerry breaking up with a girlfriend over her mask. That she appeared to wear the same mask every time they went out (there was a same dress episode back in the day). I loved that show.

  106. 106.

    Matt McIrvin

    January 3, 2022 at 3:01 pm

    @Feathers: I’ve been frustrated for several decades that the Republicans seem to have positive incentives for failure.

    When your brand is being the anti-government party, when you control the government, you can argue that your own failures are just an example of why people should vote for you. “The other guys want you to rely on the government for everything–clearly you can’t do that!”

    Or, take counter-terrorism: GW Bush was rewarded for failing to stop the 9/11 attacks with 90% popularity. If he’d succeeded in preventing them he probably wouldn’t have been reelected.

    And then there’s always the pure extortion version, which is “vote for me–the other guys have been complete failures at protecting you from the damage I do. Put me in office and maybe I’ll stop.”

  107. 107.

    Chetan Murthy

    January 3, 2022 at 3:03 pm

    @Matt McIrvin: We are indeed in a weird place regarding long covid in breakthrough cases.  There are two decent-sized studies that show it really happens, and the larger shows that the chance of long covid in case of infection is halved by getting the vaccine.  Which …. isn’t much.

    The problem is that there are just these two big studies, and for something like this, you need a ton more.  On the other side, all I know of is a TWiV episode where a doc said that in his network, his fellow docs aren’t seeing long covid in breakthrough cases.  That’s it.  Now, this is what I want to believe: it’s what will get me out of the house and down to the pool, where I can get my spirit recharged daily.  I.  Want.  This.

    So that’s all we have: a few large studies on one side, and something resembling anecdote on the other.  Even the large studies are short on stats like kinds & severity of symptoms, duration of symptoms, etc.

  108. 108.

    RSA

    January 3, 2022 at 3:14 pm

    @Feathers:

    People who are altruistic do things out of goodness and are insulted by the offer of money. In fact, they are likely to choose not to to the thing.

    I took Suzanne to mean incentives in broad, not-necessarily-monetary terms. I can understand that offering money might be counter-productive. But maybe “As a token of gratitude, we have arranged for all of our volunteers to meet with the Dalai Lama, who believes in our work…”? I’m making this up, of course, and there probably are people who are not affected by any external incentives, but I suspect they’re rare.

  109. 109.

    Roger Moore

    January 3, 2022 at 3:16 pm

    @Feathers:

    I get so frustrated when people complain about the vaccines not working.

    There are really two complaints about the vaccines not working:

    1. The vaccines haven’t succeeded in wiping out the virus the way the measles vaccine has reduced measles to the point anti-vaxxers can refuse to vaccinate safely.  This is possibly something you can blame on unvaccinated people.
    2. Vaccines don’t completely protect vaccinated people to the point we can just ignore the virus completely.  This really is an issue with the vaccine.

    People need to see the COVID vaccines as more like the flu vaccine than like the measles vaccine.  The flu vaccine works but imperfectly.  We’re never going to achieve herd immunity, and some years the vaccine is less effective than others.  It’s still a good idea to get vaccinated, but you have to reckon with the possibility you’ll still get sick.

  110. 110.

    germy

    January 3, 2022 at 3:17 pm

    I don't care what the CDC says. I only care what this CD-R says. And it says Summer Mix '04. Let's roll

    — ben "limited breadsticks" flores (@limitlessjest) January 3, 2022

  111. 111.

    Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes

    January 3, 2022 at 3:26 pm

    @WaterGirl:

    I dunno, my household economic impact from the start of the pandemic to date has been roughly 300K unrecoverable dollars (with about 200K more over the next couple of years, maybe more), and my mental state (as an extrovert who energizes on social activities) swings from apparently mildly depressed but putting on a smile and soldiering on to waking up with a sense of existential dread over facing another day. From my seat, more restrictions aren’t merely an incidental inconvenience, and going from indoor at the office to indoor at home isn’t doing it for me.

    Today, I’m not in a good place. I may be in a slightly better place tomorrow, but I know I’ll return to this place about a dozen times or more just this month – and right now, my personal emotional state is patched together with old scotch tape and some gnarly twisty bread ties from the junk drawer.

  112. 112.

    WaterGirl

    January 3, 2022 at 3:31 pm

    @Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: I am sorry to hear you are on shaky ground emotionally.  That sucks.

  113. 113.

    Brachiator

    January 3, 2022 at 3:33 pm

    @Chetan Murthy:

    So that’s all we have: a few large studies on one side, and something resembling anecdote on the other. Even the large studies are short on stats like kinds & severity of symptoms, duration of symptoms, etc.

    I did a quick google search for “long covid statistics” and among the top choices was the following, all recent reports:

    more than half will get long covid

    long Covid may affect almost 37 percent of Covid 19 patients

    one in 20 likely to suffer from long covid…

    We will be studying this for years, over the entire lifetimes of some people. What we know about Long Covid, and how to treat it and prevent it will change over time.

  114. 114.

    Chetan Murthy

    January 3, 2022 at 3:57 pm

    @Brachiator: So, the, uh, stats on long covid for the unvaxxed are chilling, and so are the many, many, many stories.  It’s all awful.  I’m purposely setting that aside, and focusing only on the vaxxed, b/c the argument is often made that a vaxxed person can throw caution to the wind, and to not do so is to be in love with the pandemic, to want restrictions to go on forever, etc, etc.  And also b/c I’m vaxxed, so this concerns me personally.

    I remember reading that the “Aktion T4″/”Life Unworthy of Life”/”Useless Eaters of Food” euthanasia campaign against disabled Germans in the late 30s and early WWII in Nazi Germany were about euthanizing the disabled born during the 1918-19 influenza epidemics.  Yeah: Long Covid will be with us, and we’ll be studying it, for a long time.

    But also to note again (sorry to be beating a dead horse): the statistics about long covid for the unvaxxed are not guaranteed to be the same for the vaxxed, and this is why I search for studies about the latter.

  115. 115.

    MomSense

    January 3, 2022 at 4:08 pm

    @Kent:

    Oh god I don’t know why but I listened to Maine Calling today on Maine Public Radio. The show was set up as an opportunity for people who haven’t been vaccinated to call in and talk to our CDC director.  They were mostly polite but I have no tolerance for the conspiracy theorists and the spectacularly stupid.  There was even a guy who is an “independent” but he got turned off about the vaccines when the vaccines were politicized against trump.  I mean WTAF.  Anyway he didn’t get vaccinated and got COVID.

  116. 116.

    Feathers

    January 3, 2022 at 4:10 pm

    @Roger Moore: But how would this change if we had a 90% vaccination rate? You would have far fewer cases overall. There would be so few breakthrough cases that the vaccine would look like it completely prevented Covid.

    This is what has so many of the disabled furious. Vaccine refusers are blocking us from reaching this state, while be treated as if they are only harming themselves.

    @Argiope: I think what some of this is capturing is the people who had genuine costs to getting vaccinated. Offering enough money to offset that will get them to come in.

  117. 117.

    trollhattan

    January 3, 2022 at 4:25 pm

    @Feathers:

    After my earlier post I rechecked the county Covid dashboard, which they had updated and our positive test count has blown past the old record (1,871 vs. 1,267 in December 2020). We’d avoided a wave #4 but now it’s here. Now we watch to see whether hospital and ICU counts will also jump–in a lot of places those have remained in check.

    Ugh.

  118. 118.

    Roger Moore

    January 3, 2022 at 4:26 pm

    @Feathers:

    We don’t really know how high a vaccination rate we need to be truly safe.  And that’s assuming the variants are well covered by the vaccine.  As omicron shows, that’s by no means guaranteed.

    I agree that the big thing is that we need to stop seeing public health actions- getting vaccinated, wearing a mask, etc.- as being primarily about protecting yourself.  They’re about protecting the community.  People who refuse to participate aren’t just accepting more risk than others.  They’re creating risk for others.  That’s why it’s called “public” health and why the community as a whole, operating through its elected leaders, needs to have final say.

  119. 119.

    Brachiator

    January 3, 2022 at 4:27 pm

    @MomSense:

    There was even a guy who is an “independent” but he got turned off about the vaccines when the vaccines were politicized against trump. I mean WTAF. Anyway he didn’t get vaccinated and got COVID.

    I don’t get it. The guy ended up getting Covid. This did not teach him anything?

  120. 120.

    Ruckus

    January 3, 2022 at 4:31 pm

    @Brachiator:

    I believe that they also think that liberals will be the ones to die and therefore their political relevance will increase. They believe they are better because they are white, and conservative. They seem to have spent whatever life they’ve had denying anything that doesn’t fit into their “ideal” life.

    I also don’t believe that they are smarter than the flies flying around a cows butt. They do after all seem to like assholes…

  121. 121.

    trollhattan

    January 3, 2022 at 4:34 pm

    @Brachiator:

    It was “worth it” to get covid while protecting Trump’s feefees and remaining staunchly “independent”?

    Yeah, nuts.

  122. 122.

    Brachiator

    January 3, 2022 at 4:41 pm

    @Roger Moore:

    That’s why it’s called “public” health and why the community as a whole, operating through its elected leaders, needs to have final say.

    The sad and crazy thing is that these right wing idiots concentrate on hating big government or Fauci in particular and their mania for “individual liberty” and “personal responsibility” and simply ignore the entire issue of public health.

  123. 123.

    Wanderer

    January 3, 2022 at 4:43 pm

    @Yarrow: Great to see your nym again.  I regularly lurk and so you have never seen mine.

  124. 124.

    Brachiator

    January 3, 2022 at 4:53 pm

    @Ruckus:

    I believe that they also think that liberals will be the ones to die and therefore their political relevance will increase. They believe they are better because they are white, and conservative.

    I don’t think they automatically see it as “liberals are going to die,.” It is often more that only they understand that Covid is not a real threat to anyone, or that He-men should be willing to face death.

    The main thing is that this is largely a right wing and lunatic fringe death cult. And the most important thing is that various nutcases have been hoist by their own petard.

    More simply, idiots who believe in conspiracies cannot adjust to new reality. So,

    Robert F Kennedy Jr and other dopes who had ALL Big Pharma cannot possibly see that the drug companies actually created a vaccine that helps people.

    The organic nuts who believe that good health and natural immunity can be gained from crunchy granola living cannot possibly see that the virus does not care about their lifestyle and will kill them even if they eat vitamins and pump sunshine up their asses.

    The “Big Government is always bad crowd” cannot accept that the federal government might be large enough to be efficient and honest, and actually have the people’s best interests in mind.

    These people have never lived in the real world because for the most part life was pretty good for them. And so they had to invent enemies.

    Now the real world is kicking them in the ass. But their entire existence is based on fighting fake enemies. And they would rather die than give up their delusions.

  125. 125.

    JaneE

    January 3, 2022 at 4:57 pm

    Life isn’t going to be even close to “normal” for a long time.  For a large segment of the population if the choice is do anything at all or watch people die, they choose watch people die.  Right now this means they are more likely to be the watched rather than the watchers, but they haven’t figured that out yet.  There is a fine line between lack of concern and real desire to see people harmed.  I am more and more convinced that the Republican mindset depends on desire to see others harmed.

  126. 126.

    germy

    January 3, 2022 at 5:01 pm

    “The meek shall inherit the earth.     They won’t have enough nerve to refuse it.”

    (Jackie Vernon)

  127. 127.

    Ksmiami

    January 3, 2022 at 5:24 pm

    @Felanius Kootea: it was more like America  has lost its ability to deal with big things because as Obama said, our politics are so small. And journalism as infotainment is literally killing us.

  128. 128.

    Matt McIrvin

    January 3, 2022 at 6:03 pm

    @Brachiator: Clinical definitions are probably behind a lot of those differences. I mean, when I get a regular cold, after the acute phase, I’m usually coughing for at least a solid month. That’s just how I am. Once it turned into a persistent bronchitis that had me using an asthma inhaler for a while. All that would probably register as long COVID in some of these studies if it happened after a COVID infection. But it’s not the same thing as having chronic fatigue or cognitive impairment for the rest of your life.

  129. 129.

    evodevo

    January 3, 2022 at 6:07 pm

    @RSA: They think it’s an acceptable risk because they hear about the 1-2% death rate and think that’s negligible.  I know, because I have argued the point with a couple of anti-vaxxers.  It probably wouldn’t get through to them if the death rate was 25%…it’s part and parcel of their right winger ideology/talibangelical fundamentalist Xtian outlook and you can’t dig it out of their heads with a pickax…

  130. 130.

    J R in WV

    January 3, 2022 at 6:43 pm

    @germy:

    JUST IN: Donald Trump Jr. and Ivanka Trump refuse to comply with subpoenas issued by the New York State attorney general’s office as it conducts a civil investigation into the way the family real estate business valued its holdings.

    Don’t regular people get arrested, taken into custody, and dragged into a Grand Jury Room if they ignore a subpoena like this?

    I for one would LOVE to see these two criminal idiots perp walked with their hands locked behind them, escorted by burly Federal Marshals onto aircraft, into police cars, into jail, into the courthouses.

    I will not bet that we can’t look forward to this great and dramatic scene!!

  131. 131.

    Anonymous

    January 3, 2022 at 6:44 pm

    @evodevo:

    it’s part and parcel of their right winger ideology/talibangelical fundamentalist Xtian outlook and you can’t dig it out of their heads with a pickax

    But I would try hard to do it, with a pickax!!

  132. 132.

    RSA

    January 3, 2022 at 9:48 pm

    @evodevo: That’s similar to my experience. It’s sad.

  133. 133.

    Procopius

    January 4, 2022 at 3:24 am

    @Brachiator: Maybe he thinks he is protected from getting Covid again. He’s wrong. People who get Covid three times are not rare. Four and five times are, but they exist. Same if you’re vaccinated. Catching Covid is common. Catching it twice or three times is not rare.

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