Good review of the BA.2 data and evidence for a new US wave. Right now we're mainly relying on hope as our defense, when it ought to be boosting at scale. It remains possible it won't be substantial—as in the UK and other countries in Europe—but I wouldn't count on that https://t.co/I7Zm4wyNRE
— Eric Topol (@EricTopol) March 20, 2022
Worth reading Myoung Cha’s entire, lengthy thread:
Very informative interactive piece, also worth clicking over to read:
In the #pandemic all countries are under-reporting #COVID19 and related deaths, for a variety of logistic and other reasons. Though the USA says officially, we've just eclipsed the 1 million deaths mark, the true toll is likely over 2 million. https://t.co/NJ4qciG9DY pic.twitter.com/KoKzkdiamb
— Laurie Garrett (@Laurie_Garrett) March 20, 2022
======
… Chinese authorities are trying to maintain their zero-Covid strategy that used swift lockdowns to help the economy grow in 2020. Beijing has increasingly emphasized how the strategy needs to be “dynamic.”
But local officials now face multiple challenges at once: Keeping their jobs whose performance hinges on controlling Covid outbreaks, limiting the spread of a highly transmissible variant and supporting enough growth to achieve the national GDP target of around 5.5% set by Beijing.
“Officials at all levels must give top priority to epidemic response,” according to a readout Friday of a top-level government meeting chaired by Chinese President Xi Jinping…
On the economic front, regions are affected by business disruptions and uncertainty, even if stricter Covid controls don’t necessarily halt production outright.
China’s steel-making hub of Tangshan city ordered that as of Sunday, all non-emergency vehicles are banned from local roads, except for those that obtain special approval. Several districts ordered residents to stay home and told businesses such as gyms to close…
In southern China, the tech and manufacturing city of Shenzhen has kept ports open despite orders last week to halt other business activity and factory production.
Shipping giant Maersk said late last week Covid testing requirements for truck drivers and stricter road control between Shenzhen and nearby cities means trucking services in the area will likely “be severely impacted by 40%.” That’s up from the company’s assessment a few days earlier of a 30% impact…
Shanghai has taken one of the most targeted lockdown policies in China, as authorities seek to balance economic growth with Covid control. The city reported 41 new confirmed cases for the weekend.
However, the outbreak is still taking its toll on big businesses. Shanghai Disney Resort announced it would be closed from Monday until further notice due to the pandemic.
Shanghai reports a record daily surge in local COVID infections as authorities scramble to test residents and rein in the Omicron variant, while the Disney resort closes until further notice https://t.co/DGnYNmObXZ pic.twitter.com/kHMVReMMY6
— Reuters (@Reuters) March 21, 2022
One reason why China feels it can't open up: the low elderly vaccination rate.
Just over half of ppl 80+ have had 2 shots. Less than 20% have been boosted. Misinformation & elderly living in rural areas among causes. And as this video shows, older Chinese won't be bossed around pic.twitter.com/iqbeaYOO4t
— Amy Qin (@amyyqin) March 20, 2022
Hong Kong leader Carrie Lam said that the city would lift flight bans on countries including Britain and the United States, as well as reduce quarantine time for travelers arriving in the city as coronavirus infections in its latest outbreak plateaus. https://t.co/ruoaTDXsU6
— The Associated Press (@AP) March 21, 2022
non-sequitur with chinese characteristics https://t.co/FuEvKF3VfV
— Gerry Doyle (@mgerrydoyle) March 21, 2022
Hong Kong Vaccine Pass requirements to be tightened earlier, 3rd jab required by May 31 https://t.co/75SNp8sp7h pic.twitter.com/ps26gesIQl
— Hong Kong Free Press HKFP (@hkfp) March 21, 2022
Here’s where Israel’s booster-promotion scheme gets an acid test…
… The rabbi was laid to rest Bnei Brak, the predominantly ultra-Orthodox city near Tel Aviv where he lived. Israeli media estimated that over 350,000 people attended the funeral procession from his home to a nearby cemetery…
The insular ultra-Orthodox community makes up about 12% of Israel’s 9.4 million people. They adhere to a stringent interpretation of Judaism, with a focus on Torah study and observance of tradition. Prominent rabbis like Kanievsky play a significant role in community life and act as arbiters in all matters.
Funerals play a key role in traditional Jewish life, and those of important rabbis often draw thousands of mourners.
Although he held no official position, Kanievsky was considered a major luminary in the non-Hassidic ultra-Orthodox world. He came to public prominence at the start of the coronavirus pandemic when he instructed his followers that closing religious seminaries was more harmful than the virus. He later walked back those claims as infections raged in densely populated Bnei Brak…
In America, it’s proven easier to discourage a leader’s devoted followers from getting vaccinated than to change their minds after new information emerges. Let’s hope the Haredim are smarter than Trumpists!
======
Sotrovimab, a monoclonal antibody made by GlaxoSmithKline & Vir Biotechnology, may prevent progression to severe Covid, new research has found https://t.co/CPX6cZkCes https://t.co/CPX6cZkCes via @medical_xpress
— delthia ricks ? (@DelthiaRicks) March 20, 2022
Silly headline, intriguing story:
… Ian was born with Wiskott-Aldrich syndrome, which makes it harder for him to fight off infections. Even a common cold can linger.
He shielded during the first wave of Covid, but coronavirus eventually found him in December 2020. He had one of the classic symptoms – a slight loss of sense of taste and smell – which cleared up within a month.
For most of us that would be the end of it, but Ian’s Covid journey was only just beginning. His doctors wanted him to keep on testing because his weakened immune system meant there was a risk he could be contagious for longer than normal.
But month after month, test after test came back positive. Ian had to give up work at the opticians where he’d be in close contact with others and stay at home…
At the time, in the early summer of 2021, there were limited treatments, so the medical team decided to try something radical. Instead of giving a vaccine to prevent an infection, they decided to use the Pfizer vaccine to treat one.
The difference in Ian’s body “was like night and day”, says Dr Ponsford. The first dose started to build his immunity, but it took a second dose to reach the point where his body could fight off the virus.
By the end of August, Ian was testing negative again…
So why was the vaccine able to clear the infection, when months of having the virus did not build up enough immunity?
Prof Stephen Jolles, clinical lead at the Immunodeficiency Centre, said: “This infection was burbling along, but with his [weakened] immune system it was just not enough to kick off a response sufficient to clear it.
“So the vaccine really made a huge difference, in antibodies and T-cells, and utilised and squeezed every last drop out of what his immune system could do.” …
The researchers think this approach can be used in more people with weakened immune systems who are struggling to fight off the infection. There are anti-viral drugs now that were not available when Ian had Covid, but the team think vaccines could offer a cheaper and more durable option.
======
We’re not testing, or reporting, but people are losing their sense of smell again…
Somebody is collecting tweets that call for "retribution" against #COVID19 vaccine and lockdown advocates such as #TonyFauci including cries of guillotining, hanging & other forms of execution.https://t.co/FUn7BfSbkj
— Laurie Garrett (@Laurie_Garrett) March 20, 2022
She’s not lying about it being “probably okay from the standpoint of the virus.” I’d go a step further and say the virus is probably pretty stoked that many people are still resistant to almost all forms of mitigation
— 1312 Overture (@michaeljkranz) March 20, 2022
On The Road – Albatrossity – Ice
Baud
Post 15,001!
NeenerNeener
Monroe County, NY:
39 new cases reported by NYSDOH yesterday. I took an at home COVID test last night that came back negative, so it appears I didn’t get the ‘Rona in the MRI machine on Friday.
SiubhanDuinne
15,001!
Many thanks, AL, for all your posts on so many subjects.
ETA: Curses Baud.
Baud
@SiubhanDuinne:
You remind me of my mom.
New Deal democrat
I will keep this brief, as few States reported yesterday.
Cases declined under 30,000 to 29,900. Deaths declined to 866.
Of the States reporting, NY, NJ, and AR showed increases.
Internationally the UK was up about 35% week over week, but only 10% in the last 5 days. Germany was up 14% week over week. Austria is up 10% for the week, but only 4% in the last 5 days.
We may have just seen the short term low in cases in the US. Deaths could still decline to 100 in the next month or so. I believe the BA.2 waves in Europe are only lasting 2-4 weeks. I believe the US experience will be similar, and the % increase will not be as much as we have seen in Europe.
YY_Sima Qian
On 3/20 Mainland China reported 1,947 new domestic confirmed (54 previously asymptomatic), 2,384 new domestic asymptomatic cases. There were 2 deaths.
Guangdong Province reported 38 new domestic confirmed (3 previously asymptomatic) & 16 new domestic asymptomatic cases.
Guangxi “Autonomous” Region reported 21 new domestic asymptomatic cases (13 at Qinzhou, 4 at Fangchenggang & 4 at Chongzuo). 1 domestic asymptomatic case was released from isolation. There currently are 78 active domestic confirmed (43 at Fangchenggang, 11 at Baise, 19 at Qinzhou, 3 at Nanning, & 1 each at Chongzuo & Guilin) & 214 active domestic asymptomatic cases (59 at Fangchenggang, 14 at Baise, 64 at Chongzuo, 68 at Qinzhou, 5 at Liuzhou, 4 at Beihai) in the province. 1 zone at Fangchenggang are currently at Medium Risk. 5 sites at Qinzhou have been elevated to Medium Risk.
Hunan Province reported 10 new domestic confirmed cases, 8 at Huaihua (7 mild & 1 moderate, all traced close contacts, 3 already under centralized quarantine), & 1 each at Changsha (a traced close contact already under centralized quarantine) & Shaoyang (via screening of residents in areas under movement control). There currently are 28 active domestic confirmed (13 at Huaihua, 6 each at Changsha & Shaoyang, 2 at Yueyang, & 1 at Yongzhou) cases in the province. 2 zones at Huaihua are currently at Medium Risk, as are 2 residential compounds at Changsha & 1 zone at Shaoyang.
Inner Mongolia “Autonomous” Region reported 2 new domestic confirmed & 5 new domestic asymptomatic cases. 2 domestic confirmed cases recovered. There currently are 10 active domestic confirmed & 24 active domestic asymptomatic cases in the province.
Tianjin Municipality reported 18 new domestic confirmed (6 previously asymptomatic, 15 mild & 3 moderate) & 7 new domestic asymptomatic cases, 13 of the 19 new domestic positive cases are traced close contacts already under quarantine & 6 via screening of residents in areas under movement control. There currently are 402 active domestic confirmed & 28 active domestic asymptomatic cases in the city. 4 sites are currently at High Risk. 10 sites are currently at Medium Risk.
Shandong Province reported 13 new domestic confirmed (2 previously asymptomatic) & 286 new domestic asymptomatic cases. 27 domestic confirmed cases recovered & 61 domestic asymptomatic cases were released from isolation. There currently are 1,160 active domestic confirmed cases & 2,075 active asymptomatic cases in the province. As not all of the administrative divisions in the province provide data on recoveries, I cannot track the count of active cases in all of the administrative divisions, given the multiple simultaneous outbreaks.
At Shanxi Province 2 domestic confirmed cases recovered. There currently are 7 active domestic confirmed cases in the province (5 at Yuncheng & 1 each at Jinzhong & Jincheng).
Hebei Province reported 51 new domestic confirmed & 356 domestic asymptomatic cases. 17 domestic confirmed cases recovered & 25 domestic asymptomatic cases were released from isolation. There currently are 338 active domestic confirmed & 2,073 active asymptomatic case in the province. As the province does not break down recoveries by administrative divisions, I cannot track the count of active cases in administrative divisions, given the multiple simultaneous outbreaks.
Liaoning Province reported 35 new domestic confirmed & 109 new domestic asymptomatic cases. 6 domestic confirmed cases recovered & 2 domestic asymptomatic cases were released from isolation. There currently are 357 active domestic confirmed & 492 active domestic asymptomatic cases in the province. As the province does not break down recoveries by administrative divisions, I cannot track the count of active cases in administrative divisions, given the multiple simultaneous outbreaks.
Heilongjiang Province reported 27 new domestic confirmed & 14 new domestic asymptomatic cases. 2 domestic asymptomatic cases were released from isolation. There currently are 148 active domestic confirmed & 177 active domestic asymptomatic cases in the province.
Jilin Province reported 1,542 new domestic confirmed (36 previously asymptomatic, 1,531 mild, 6 moderate, 3 serious & 2 critical) & 549 new domestic asymptomatic cases. 32 domestic positive cases recovered. As the province does not consistently break down recoveries by confirmed & asymptomatic cases or by jurisdictions, I can no longer track the count of active case counts in the different jurisdictions.
Beijing Municipality reported 4 new domestic confirmed (3 mild & 1 moderate) cases, a traced close contact already under centralized quarantine & 3 via screening of persons deemed at risk of exposure. 1 village is currently at Medium Risk.
Shanghai Municipality reported 24 new domestic confirmed & 734 new domestic asymptomatic cases, 674 of the new domestic positive cases are traced close contacts already under centralized quarantine, & the rest from screening of persons deemed at risk of exposure. 1 domestic confirmed case recovered & 40 domestic asymptomatic case was released from isolation. There currently are 198 active domestic confirmed & 2,793 active domestic asymptomatic cases in the city. 12 sites are currently at Medium Risk.
Shaanxi Province reported 14 new domestic confirmed cases (11 mild & 3 moderate). 10 domestic confirmed cases recovered. There currently are 335 active domestic confirmed cases in the province. As the province does not break down recoveries by administrative divisions, I cannot track the count of active cases in administrative divisions, given the multiple simultaneous outbreaks.
At Hubei Province 2 domestic confirmed cases recovered & 1 domestic asymptomatic case was released from isolation. There currently are 2 active domestic confirmed (both moderate, 1 each at Wuhan & Shiyan) & 1 active domestic asymptomatic (at Xianning) cases in the province..
Jiangsu Province reported 58 new domestic asymptomatic cases. 15 domestic confirmed cases recovered & 11 domestic asymptomatic cases were released from isolation. There currently are 110 active domestic confirmed & 382 active domestic asymptomatic cases in the province. As not all of the jurisdictions in the province track recoveries, I cannot track the count of active cases in all of the administrative divisions, given the multiple simultaneous outbreaks.
Anhui Province reported 10 new domestic asymptomatic (3 at Haozhou & 7 at Tongling) cases, 12 of the new domestic positive cases are tracked close contacts already under centralized quarantine & 2 via screening of residents in areas under movement restrictions. There currently are 7 active confirmed (3 at Ma’anshan & 4 at Tongling) & 72 active domestic asymptomatic (30 at Ma’anshan, 4 each at Haozhou & Suzhou, 32 at Tongling & 1 each at Anqing, & Chuzhou) cases in the province. 2 villages at Ma’anshan, & 4 sites at Tongling, are currently at Medium Risk.
Zhejiang Province reported 2 new domestic confirmed & 16 new domestic asymptomatic cases. As the province does not break down recoveries by administrative divisions, I cannot track the count of active cases in administrative divisions, given the multiple simultaneous outbreaks.
Gansu Province reported 6 new domestic confirmed (1 previously asymptomatic) & 27 new domestic asymptomatic cases. 5 domestic confirmed cases recovered & 1 domestic asymptomatic cases were released from isolation. There currently are 201 active domestic confirmed & 191 active domestic asymptomatic cases in the province.
Fujian Province reported 154 new domestic confirmed (6 previously asymptomatic) & 107 new domestic asymptomatic cases. There currently are 790 active domestic confirmed & 445 active domestic asymptomatic cases in the province.
At Xining in Qinghai Province there currently are 2 active domestic confirmed cases in the city.
At Zunyi in Guizhou Province there currently are 9 active domestic confirmed & 3 active domestic asymptomatic cases in the city.
Sanya in Hainan Province reported 1 new domestic asymptomatic case, a person arriving from Shanghai on 3/17.
Jiangxi Province reported 1 new domestic confirmed & 33 new domestic asymptomatic cases. There currently are 10 active domestic confirmed & 107 active domestic asymptomatic cases in the city.
Henan Province reported 1 new domestic confirmed & 9 new domestic asymptomatic cases, all at Jiaozuo, both person recently arriving from Shanghai. There currently are 12 active domestic confirmed (5 at Puyang, 2 each at Zhengzhou & Jiaozuo, 1 each at Luoyang, Shangqiu & Xinyang) & 14 active domestic asymptomatic (13 at Jiaozuo & at Puyang) cases in the province. 7 sites at Puyang & 1 village at Jiaozuo are currently Medium Risk.
Chongqing Municipality reported 1 new domestic confirmed (mild) & 1 new domestic asymptomatic cases, both traced close contacts already under centralized quarantine. There currently is 56 active domestic confirmed & 17 active domestic asymptomatic cases in the city. 3 dormitory buildings are currently at Medium Risk.
Yunnan Province reported 4 new domestic confirmed & 25 new domestic asymptomatic cases. 6 domestic confirmed cases recovered & 9 new domestic asymptomatic were released from isolation. There currently are 84 active domestic confirmed & 389 active domestic asymptomatic cases remaining in the province. As the province does not break down recoveries by administrative divisions, I cannot track the count of active cases in administrative divisions, given the multiple simultaneous outbreaks.
Imported Cases
On 3/20, Mainland China reported 80 new imported confirmed cases (23 previously asymptomatic, 2 in Guangdong), 108 imported asymptomatic cases, 6 imported suspect cases:
Overall in Mainland China, 625 confirmed cases recovered (279 imported), 284 asymptomatic cases were released from isolation (122 imported) & 77 were reclassified as confirmed cases (23 imported), & 10,095 individuals were released from quarantine. Currently, there are 21,388 active confirmed cases in the country (1,771 imported), 39 in serious condition (1 imported), 18,327 active asymptomatic cases (1,658 imported), 10 suspect cases (all imported). 336,233 traced contacts are currently under centralized quarantine.
As of 3/20, 3,226.334M vaccine doses have been injected in Mainland China, an increase of 3.456M doses in the past 24 hrs.
On 3/21, Hong Kong reported 14,068 new positive cases, 5 imported & 14,063 domestic (4,518 via RT-PCR & 9,545 from rapid antigen tests), 179 deaths (26 fully vaccinated, including 2 boosted) + 44 backlogged deaths.
On 3/21, Taiwan reported 98 new positive cases, 93 imported & 5 domestic.
Nicole
Those one-star reviews remind me of a video that went viral in 2020 of a young woman who set out to do a real-time reaction video of the latest Starbucks concoction. Instead it turned into a real-time realization that she had COVID.
Matt McIrvin
Most of eastern Massachusetts may already be past its post-Omicron low and creeping up again. I suspect our R value is slightly above 1 again through computations based on longer-term averages don’t show that. But cases continue to drop in southern NH and Maine.
Amir Khalid
Malaysia’s Ministry of Health reported 19,105 new Covid-19 cases yesterday in its media statement, for a cumulative reported total of 3,993,124 cases. It also reported 71 deaths for an adjusted cumulative total of 34,400 deaths – 0.86% of the cumulative reported total, 0.92% of resolved cases.
Malaysia’s nationwide Rt stands at 0.93.
158 confirmed cases are in ICU, 95 of them on ventilators. Meanwhile, 28,250 more patients have recovered, for a cumulative total of 3,684,665 patients recovered – 92.3% of the cumulative reported total.
One new cluster was reported yesterday, for a cumulative total of 6,912 clusters. 304 clusters are currently active; 6,608 clusters are now inactive.
18,719 new cases reported yesterday were local infections. 386 new cases were imported.
The National Covid-19 Immunisation Programme (PICK) administered 27,330 doses of vaccine on 20th March: 9,849 first doses, 1,116 second doses, and 16,365 booster doses. The cumulative total is 68,484,635 doses administered: 27,424,791 first doses, 25,786,987 second doses, and 15,483,571 booster doses. 84.0% of the population have received their first dose, 79.0% their second dose, and 47.4% their booster dose.
lowtechcyclist
I’d love to ask these vile creatures, what lockdowns? Some states had a few months of semi-lockdowns in the spring of 2020. Restaurants, gyms, bars, and movie theaters closed for a few months, and had reduced seating requirements for awhile after that.
But when’s the last time a vaccinated, masked person couldn’t go wherever he wanted, and do whatever the hell he wanted? Pretty much everything had opened up by the late spring of 2021, and hardly anyplace closed up during the Delta and Omicron waves.
Now if they’re complaining that some places asked to see your vaccination card before letting you come in, or you had to wear a mask to the store, yeah sure, hanging offenses, no question. Fucking snowflakes.
SFAW
@Baud:
Beat me to it, ya bastid!
NorthLeft12
Re- Laurie Garrett’s tweet about anti-vax/pro-COVID protestors demanding punishment for public health officials; yeah, that is happening up here in Canada too.
The morans are still protesting even though almost all public health guidelines have been abandoned, even though COVID is still raging (my 85 year old Father-in-law and his wife just caught it). These people want public admissions that they were right and public health officials were wrong for the entire pandemic.
They are ignorant, cruel, and selfish people that are a blight on modern society. I am done with them.
Baud
@SFAW:
Only because Anne Laurie took a well deserved night off.
Barbara
@lowtechcyclist: “Lockdown” for these people means asking them to take any step for the protection of others that they don’t want to.
Matt McIrvin
Looking at the city/town breakdown of current case rates in MA is interesting. I say cases are creeping up in Essex County but this doesn’t seem to be the case in the Merrimack Valley, where I live; I think it’s actually an outbreak centered on Wenham and Manchester-by-the-Sea, well-off communities further south. And Middlesex County is dominated by a still-raging outbreak in Cambridge.
I suspect that right now, infections are not mostly burning through the heavily Hispanic towns full of “essential workers” that were the focus of earlier waves; it’s white Republicans and college students.
JAFD
Reactions to not wearing mask on train:
https://twitter.com/PsychDocB1/status/1505577882759974917
As a Philadelphia native, it did my heart good to read this !
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
Sex parties starting up again?
SFAW
The Laurie Garrett tweet about Bhattacharya and Kulldorff is a bit, shall we say, distressing.
And I used to opine that Rupert Murdoch is the “person” most to blame for the ongoing attempted destruction of democracy in the US. I think I need to modify that slightly: he’s also the “person” most to blame for One Million (more or less) unnecessary deaths in this country. If I believed in Hell, I would be not-very-much consoled by the idea that he’d be spending Eternity there. Unfortunately, there’s not much else that will happen to him (or Lachlan).
SFAW
@JAFD:
Whatever. In NYC, they would have picked him up and thrown him through the subway car door. After having practiced a few times with the doors shut. [Or they would have dragged him to the next car, but he then somehow managed to slip and fall off between cars. (“Oops!”)]
ETA: Of course, I am in no way attempting to insult Philly sports fans, who are still the worst.
Nicole
@SFAW: I am just back from a week in Florida, and my husband commented on how angry so many of the people he saw around there seem to be. I speculated that Fox News will be studied 100 years from now as something that had a profound effect on the shaping of American culture. Because I think Rupert Murdoch is responsible for a lot of the angry mindset in red parts of the country. That channel feeds angry indignation 24-7 to its viewers and eventually that carries over into your non-television watching life too. Anger is addictive, and like most addictions, ultimately not very good for quality of life.
SFAW
@Nicole:
Not sure whether it’s Rupert or Roger Ailes. Probably a combination of the two. But considering that Murdoch also “worked his magic” in Australia and England before setting his sights on America, I’m thinking Murdoch. And considering this has continued unabated since Ailes died …
Matt McIrvin
…yeah, looking at recent news reports out of Cambridge, MA, this is totally a college-campus outbreak. The city has been stressing that the situation with townies isn’t as bad, though I don’t know if that’s persisted. New case rates for the whole state are twice as high for the age brackets overlapping college than for everyone else.
The other odd bit of news there is that while the change in COVID death-counting standards brought official death numbers down in most of the state, it actually caused them to go up in Cambridge–whatever standard the town had been using before was more restrictive.
(Cambridge in England seems to be having a rough time too.)
mrmoshpotato
And some states run by Ron DeathSentence and Greg Abattoir just went “Fuck reporting. We’re done with the virus. Oh, and don’t get vaccinated so it hurts Biden, because we’re amoral shitstains.”
bjacques
That Nuremburg 2.0 reminds me of the Nuremburg website in the early Noughts that posted names, fac s, and home addresses of people working in women’s clinics were abortion was available. An acquaintance of mine in NL mirrored it in the spirit of free speech absolutism but eventually removed it.
mrmoshpotato
AKA evidence. Hopefully “Kill the scientists” shitstains can be cellmates with the Insurrection shitstains.
SFAW
@Baud:
Wouldn’t the Rethugs go for high school, not college? [And, not sure why this occurred to me, but is Gaetz ever going to get indicted?]
Jesse
The tweets recently seem to be leaning hard into finger wagging these days. There have been finger waggers all along. Often, they turn out to be right. But I am finding myself getting quite irritated with the “Americans, you are dumber than rocks” and “I predict major disaster. Mask up!” Or: “You keep saying ‘endemic’, that word, it does not mean what you think it means. Idiot.” Or: “cases are up 2%, here’s why that’s the end of the world — again” hot takes. It’s a hyper vigilance, the polar opposite of COVID denalism.
What are we supposed to do? We’ve got the vaccines. They are amazing. Everyone and their dog knows that. And those who don’t, won’t. We’ve got pills (bottlenecked, I understand, but those bottlenecks will surely get better over time, just as they were initially with the vaccines). We’ve got masks. Yes, we all know the nonsense that gets spewed. But the fact is, most people adhere to the public health measures, which are largely science-based.
We know that finger-wagging anti-vaxxers doesn’t make a lick of difference. So who’s the audience for the finger-wagging? The CDC? Governors or other state- and county level CDC equivalents? Are they really going to re-impose mandator masking, today, because cases are going up in a few places? Because a finger-wagger on Twitter said to do so? I doubt it.
I say this as a person who supports all sorts of public health measures. I’m vaxxed, boosted, mask universally indoors. I’ll probably continue to mask for a long time, and if more boosters are needed, I’ll get them. I am not arguing for a “drop all COVID requirements whatsoever forever and ever amen” position. I’m not saying this from an anti-vaxx or libertarian or other nonsense position. I’m just saying that I’m tired of the finger-wagging. There may have been a point when that was useful. It a lot less useful now. I think it’s not politically feasible in a democracy. Don’t look at China and think “yeah they’re doing a great job I wish we could do that here”. You don’t want that.
What I’m trying to point out is a kind of permanent anti-polyanna phenomenon. The anti-polyanna paints a world where you can’t let up for even one second. Where relaxing of measures — even in the face of dramatic declines of cases, hospitalizations, and deaths — is unjustifiable. Where the slightest increase *somewhere* is a sign of impending doom. The anti-polyanna is, of course, materially right: the virus doesn’t let up for a second, and welcomes people letting down their guard. The anti-polyanna had a much stronger case when vaccines didn’t exist, or were scarce. When our understanding of different variants was less developed. When we didn’t have COVID pills. Those were scarier times. We are still in a scary time. And who knows, maybe this comment won’t age like fine wine and we will see in 30 days that cases are once again through the roof, and the finger waggers were right.
All I’m saying is that COVID harshes my mellow enough already. The finger-waggers harsh it even more.
Sorry if this is incoherent. I had to get this off my chest.
BTW Anne Laurie thank you for doing this for so long. I look forward to it every day!
mrmoshpotato
@lowtechcyclist:
I’d argue those weren’t lockdowns. It’s not like anyone in the US wasn’t allowed to leave their homes. It makes the whining of these threatening assholes even more stupid.
ETA – apparently we’re in agreement on this.
mrmoshpotato
@JAFD: Well done, Philly!
Soprano2
@Jesse: You have articulated how I feel, too. At this point I figure if the anti-vaxxers want to risk severe illness or death to “own the libs” there isn’t anything we can do about it. What people can do is the same thing they’ve been doing all along, which is to protect themselves as best as they can. The good thing is that we have a lot more and better ways to protect ourselves now than we did in April 2020. All the “finger-wagging”, as you put it, gets tiresome, and I think at this point most people are tuning it out, so it’s not effective anyway.
O. Felix Culpa
When I lived in Uganda (mid-oughties), it was not uncommon for a child to start falling ill from malaria at night and be dead by morning. As in the first tweet, “endemic” does not mean harmless.
Soprano2
@mrmoshpotato: I always ask them “what lockdowns? Do you know what a lockdown is?” and of course they don’t.
Matt McIrvin
@Jesse: I think Eric Topol is trying to convince the Biden administration to push booster shots harder, maybe approve a fourth shot. There may be some feasible upside there as I suspect a lot of people who aren’t antivaxxers never bothered to get a third shot, and the messaging on boosters hasn’t been great.
O. Felix Culpa
@Matt McIrvin:
I’m disinclined to blame “messaging,” unless it’s the messaging by the anti-vaxxer contingent.
Jesse
@Soprano2: I wonder how many people were fined or arrested — in the entire US — from March 15, 2020 to, say, June 15, 2020 — for violating whatever form of lockdown existed in one’s locality. If there were even 10 such cases, I’d be surprised.
I think that’s what they are trying to evoke when talking about “lockdown”. As if the state built up a kind of omnipresent Berlin Wall of the mind, with armed guys ready to take you down if you stepped outside your boundary.
OTOH, I don’t know if we have a good punchy word or compact term to describe it. “Shelter-in-place order” works, but is bulky legalese. “Lockdown” is a shorthand. I myself use “lockdown”, even though I was of course not literally locked down (no one was).
Matt McIrvin
@O. Felix Culpa: It was honestly confusing, I think because the medical establishment was divided on boosters before the Omicron wave hit, and the guidance kept changing under fears of booster campaigns depleting vaccine supply. There are lots of places where the population was pretty heavily vaccinated but under a third are boosted.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
Right. I remember when being against boosters was the progressive position because of limited vaccine supply available to foreign countries.
Jesse
@Matt McIrvin: That was my understanding of the back-and-forth, too. Another reason might be that one could honestly debate at the time whether boosters were needed, medically speaking. Imagine you could craft the perfect public messaging campaign and had vast supplies. The question is then: do really really *need* boosters (at that point in time)? I think there was a time when you could honestly answer the question with “no”. “Are we really dealing with 3-dose vaccines here (speaking of Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech. of course), or are we dealing with 2-dose vaccines?” I think it took some time to realize that it’s more the former than the latter.
Steeplejack
Re BA.2, @Rschooley:
Further thread at the link.
smith
I’m wondering if there’s been some weird change in MSM perceptions of covid denialism. This is based solely on this day’s perusal of the MSN news aggregator for covid news which I skim every day. I’ve never seen so many stories about anti-vaxxers dying and ivermectin nuts acting outrageously. It could almost be the Herman Cain Awards page. What made them start paying so much attention to a phenomenon that’s more than a year old?
smith
Probably fewer than those who were assaulted or murdered for asking someone to put on a mask.
Jesse
@Steeplejack: I saw that too. But isn’t that just logic? “Could be nothing, a little, or a lot.”
I get that these guys are trying to be useful, but I personally don’t find that very insightful. It comes across as finger-wagging to this reader.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
About Geogry’s tweet about malaria. measles and tb; all those were solved in the first world by mitigation efforts,
I wouldn’t be to surprised in the crazy way American politics goes to get the vaccination rate to needed to get to covid down to say the flue would require the pandemic to officially “end” in the US so the Crazies can find something else to scream about.
The Moar You Know
@Nicole: While Fox certainly carries a rather outsized share of the blame, at this point I think most of it is being propagated through and by social media, the Radio Rwanda of world civilization.
That humans are addicted to anger is not a mystery; it’s how to get them to STOP acting on it, and seeking out more, that’s the mystery.
RobertDSC-iPhone 8
Thank you for every post, Anne Laurie. All of them are appreciated.
Still masking up at work. Will continue to do so for a long time to come.
The Moar You Know
@bjacques: I used to believe in this, although I’d have never gone to that extreme. Regardless, it’s a pretty privileged place to be coming from.
I no longer believe in free speech at all. Look what we’ve done with it.
NotMax
Locally,
Elsewhere,
Matt McIrvin
@The Moar You Know:
The US legal notion of freedom of speech is an extreme outlier by even liberal-democratic standards. But if we abandon the principle entirely, it will be used against us by the people currently going after “critical race theory” and mentions of homosexuality in the schools.
bluefoot
@Matt McIrvin:
I mentioned on here last week that a work function caused a big outbreak in my department. (This is in Cambridge, MA.) At least 25% of the people who attended the event got COVID; most within 3-5 days, though one didn’t show symptoms until day 7(!). That’s among a fully vaccinated and boosted group of people. The event was at a local restaurant so people weren’t masked. Whatever variant is circulating in Cambridge, it is seriously contagious.
At least one (young, healthy) person is pretty sick, though not hospitalized.
Steeplejack
@Jesse:
The point is that we are slacking off on even mildly prudent measures.
From the New York Times article linked in that thread:
And we’re still having, what, 1,200 deaths a day from COVID?
Another Scott
@Steeplejack: I was actually hopeful for a while (maybe a week) that we were coming off the Omicron peak and that hospitalizations and deaths were past their peak and that we might actually have a bit of a respite before the next wave, and maybe we would finally get lucky and not have another severe wave.
Then I looked at South Korea. And other countries in western Europe that were having new waves start up.
And I look at the CovidActNow.org numbers and the lack of reporting in the US, and the often nonsensical numbers (e.g. Florida once had something like 10,000 new infections and 1 death reported).
This seems to me to be a dangerous time. There are still too many that aren’t vaccinated. Omicron (of whatever sub-type) is still extremely contagious. Too many states and localities are not collecting data, and too many elected officials are demanding that we treat the pandemic as if it’s over when it’s not over. In a way it’s worse than earlier, because at least we were trying to collect accurate information back then.
I’m going to keep masking for a long time, it looks like…
Grr…,
Scott.
smith
About 800-900 a day now. We’re just now getting below what it was in the dip between delta and omicron. The death rate per 100K right now is almost 4 times what it was in the brief quiet period we had around the first week of July 2021.
Matt McIrvin
@bluefoot: I found a graph of it:
https://cityofcambridge.shinyapps.io/COVID19/?tab=new
Looks like Cambridge is actually coming down from a second peak that topped out around March 6th. This is the kind of thing we’re seeing all over–these localized outbreaks that don’t peak as high as the main Omicron surge, but infect a lot of people for a few weeks.
smith
Also concerning the covid death rate: The very best rolling average number we’ve had since the beginning of the pandemic was 323 deaths on 7/7/21. That works out to 117,895 deaths per year, quite a bit higher than the death rate of the worst recent flu season, which, if I recall correctly, was about 80K deaths. This could be the most optimistic view of what endemic covid will look like, barring the development of better treatments and vaccines (and better uptake of the latter).
Matt McIrvin
oh, yeah, another town in Mass. that is having a sort of bounce outbreak? Amherst. As in UMass Amherst. Yeah, it’s a pattern.
Steeplejack
@Another Scott:
We all know that cliché that if, in the aftermath, it looks like you overreacted, that means you did the right things. We seem to be doing the opposite of that. I, too, will be keeping a mask handy for a while.
Steeplejack
@smith:
Thanks. I don’t follow the stats on a daily basis, so I’m rusty on where to look.
bluefoot
@Matt McIrvin:
Thanks for the link. I hadn’t realized Cambridge was compiling data to this granularity. I don’t know how many people in our outbreak got their confirmatory PCR in Cambridge rather than where they live. I do know at least some of them reported it to our company occupational health but I don’t know if the company reports to Cambridge.
On the positive side, as far as I know none of the people with COVID have given it to anyone else.
Matt McIrvin
@Another Scott: South Korea never had the first Omicron wave–that’s what they’re experiencing now.
The story in Europe is that a lot of these countries were coming down off Omicron with some reasonable precautions still in place, then they lifted everything when the daily case rate was still very high, just because it was decreasing and there was political pressure to declare victory. And they got a second peak, but in most of these places, it already seems to be turning over.
My inexpert spitballing guess is that what happens in the US will be a bit different. I think we got more of our Omicron suffering up front. We will get a second peak, but it will be more drawn-out because it will consist of brushfire epidemics that happen at different times in different places (like the ones in Cambridge and Amherst). And it won’t be nearly as tall as the initial Omicron wave because of the resistance from prior Omicron infection in so much of the population.
In any individual place, we will have respites that last for a little while. Right now we’re getting one where I live–the Merrimack Valley, around the MA/NH border.
Of course, in a couple of months some of that general Omicron resistance will wear off and then we might have another big wave.
Matt McIrvin
The most surprising recent result, to me: in various animal tests, Omicron-tailored booster shots don’t do significantly better against Omicron than boosting with the original COVID vaccines. My impression is that it might be because of “original antigenic sin”: the immune system gears up to fight the thing it was originally vaccinated against and just interprets the booster as more of the same. But, also, the original vaccines provide broader long-term protection than you might think.
I suppose that story has good and bad aspects. It means there’s no far more effective Omicron magic bullet coming. But it also means that booster campaigns don’t have to retool and throw out their old supplies.
JustRuss
This is my first day back at work after the state lifted the indoor mask mandate. Not seeing many masks, but it’s spring break so not many people around. I’ll keep wearing mine for a while.
Matt McIrvin
…I do, though, wonder if an Omicron-tailored shot would perform much better if administered as the FIRST shot.