This NYTimes piece says it may be returning. People mostly aren't masking--the Post mentioned very few masked at last night's state dinner. And they aren't boosting.
(I got my fifth shot, the co-valent booster) the other day. I sometimes mask, sometimes don't.) We seem to be accepting of roughly 300 deaths a day, or maybe 100,000 a year. What does the future hold
Reading "Uncontrolled Spread" by Scott Gottlieb on the US response to Covid19. So far (100pp in) it's good. Gottlieb was on the outside (former Trump FDA director for a couple years) but offering input via Twitter and close enough to people on the inside to be knowledgable.
Those who attack the medical establishment often cite the confusing advice about masks in the early months of the pandemic. Gottlieb says both CDC and FDA relied on their experience in dealing with flu epidemics, assuming that Covid-19 would be like the flu, SARS and MERs. They were tracking respiratory cases using their "syndrome" system, which relied on reports filtering up from Medicare and hospitals, using statistical analysis to try to determine if there was a surge in cases which might mean a new virus. The system had defects--it was after-the-fact--and not precise.
Dr. Birx made much of the failure to identify asymptomatic spread. Gottlieb also notes the problem, with an interesting consequence. Some early cases, which we now recognize as resulting from asymptomatic spread which isn't usual in influencza, were instead explained by fomites--the idea that the virus was deposited on surfaces. This meant the early emphasis on handwashing and cleaning surfaces, and the discouraging of masks.
I've commented on it before. Some bits:
Reading Dr. Deborah Brix's "Silent Invasion", her memoir of her work in the pandemic. It's basically chronological, and I'm just about 2 weeks in.
She is trying to maneuver among the various camps in the Trump administration:
I think part of the gloom about the country must be perception--we don't see the country as having rebounded back to normal. One indicator: rush-hour traffic. I don't know what it's like elsewhere in the country, but in Reston the parkway used to often have some backups aroun 9:15, when I was crossing on my way to the garden or out for my walk. Even when there weren't backups the traffic was pretty heavy, especially for someone who remembers the time when it was a two-lane road, not a four-land divided highway.
But not these days. During the height of the pandemic there was little traffic. Now the traffic is heavier, but I've not seen any backups since April 2020. My ingrained definition of "normal" is heavy traffic and backups; by that definition we aren't back to normal yet.
Having lived through the inflation of the 1970s and 80s, I've been more skeptical of the promises last year that any inflation would be only temporary.
While unions are less important now than then, and they were often blamed for inflation, we also have more things indexed for inflation now (like Social Security).
But my own theory about inflation is this:
Before the pandemic the economy was operating smoothly following its usual routines. Because of the pandemic lots of routines were disrupted. Whenever there's change or disruption, the resulting friction gets handled by grease, grease known as money. Don't have enough workers, give bonuses and hike salaries. Don't trust going to restaurants, rely on delivery and increase the tips. Etc. Etc.
That means to me the inflation won't be temporary but will last until we establish new routines, which will take a while.
My wife and I order the occasional pizza from Dominos. For years our usual order was about $17 plus tip. These days it's up to $31. Part of that is the inclusion of a delivery charge, part is a more generous tip. I suspect not only are the ingredients a bit more costly, but salaries for the help are up and management has been scared by the ups and downs of operating through the pandemic, thus becoming more cautious. And the reality is that demand likely has stayed strong because of the pandemic.
William Goodman said: "in Hollywood no body knows anything" about what makes for a hit movie.
One lesson from covid is the limitations of knowledge, of expertise. Over 2 years we've seen a lot of predictions, some were accurate within their frame, some were correct at the general level (i.e., the virus would mutate and the mutations would have different characteristics), but all had trouble tracking the changes over time.
Another lesson is how vulnerable we the public are to misinformation.
I'd answer "yes", if you're smart enough to get yourself vaccinated, you're smarter than your unvaccinated friend or relative. And I'd point to this CDC study (via Lawyers, Guns and Money--Paul Campos) which shows a big difference in death rates between the two groups: vaccinated and unvaccinated.
The big thing about the study is the difference is based on death rates excluding Covid.
The pandemic has been a shock to many systems, institutions, and habits; some good and some bad. I think one good one is reducing the friction in social participation.
[For example, take a home owners association (HOA). After I moved to Reston I was automatically a member of the Pinecrest HOA. As such for some years I participated in the annual meetings, but my enthusiasm waned as my guilt about letting others shoulder the responsibilities for the cluster increased. So I don't think I've been in an annual meeting this century, much less the monthly board meetings.
But with the advent of covid the board meetings converted to Zoom. That by itself wasn't sufficient to get me to log in, but a renovation of a sidewalk by our house raised an issue sufficient to get me over the hurdle, to learn Zoom well enough to [what's the term for attending a Zoom meeting?]. I noted this week there were 11 attending, 4 board members and 6 residents, plus the maintenance rep.
I don't know that I will continue my attendance, but I think Zoom and the stimulus of the pandemic likely has permanently increased the interest and attendance at the meetings. It makes sense: you no longer have to venture out of the house and join strangers, make small talk, etc. Instead you just fire up the laptop or cellphone while sitting in your easy chair, and you have easy control over the degree to which you participate. It's great for introverts, who must be a sizeable part of the population.
I gather from this post in the FSA Facebook Group that the issue of complying with the federal vaccine mandate is controversial. I ran across a post somewhere today which indicated the actual process of implementing the mandate was going to take a while.
I wonder whether with the delta surge declining will the administration actually go through with it. It sounds as if even when implemented there would be a drawn-out process for penalizing anyone who didn't get vaccinated, so it may become a dead letter. We'll see. In the meantime there's a lot of angst out there, and it may be creating conflict in small offices where there's strongly held divergent opinions.
We who support the Biden's position need to remember the human costs of how it's implemented.
Volkh Conspiracy has a guest poster writing on the "nondelegation doctrine", the idea that Congress should grant power to the executive only with strict guidelines.
For anyone interested but too lazy to go to the Reason magaizine, here's my comment:
Tamar Haspel is one of the people I follow on Twitter. She and her husband raise oysters in Maine, and she writes on food and diet issues, usually with the refrain that diet panaceas are just that, panaceas not based on hard science. That's a position I can identify with.
She tweeted this about two new promising obesity drugs (more in the thread):
For all y'all dissing obesity drugs:
— Tamar Haspel (@TamarHaspel) September 16, 2021
EVERYONE would prefer it if we could all just eat healthful foods we enjoy to be the weight we want to be.
But we can't, and if you insist that's the only possible solution you're abandoning people, often desperate, who want to lose weight https://t.co/JuvPuut4b9
Her point is that we eat not because of hunger but because of temptation. It got me thinking. As I've written, I think, I'm a creature of habit. I'm also skinny. Are the two facts related? I think they are: for whatever reason I have the habit of regarding food as fuel, to be consumed as soon as possible without wasting any time or energy in savoring, or in deciding what to eat. So my meals, at least the ones I make or buy as opposed to those my wife prepares, tend to be the same from day to day.
So my decisions on what to eat don't allow much room for temptation by food. (Nor, since I eat regularly, does feeling hungry have much to do with it--by eating at the times and with the food I'm habituated to I avoid hungry.)
I'll jump from this analysis of me to extrapolate to human institutions--most institutions are based on habits. That's part of what upsets us about covid-19; the pandemic has upset our habits which means undermining the foundations of some of our institutions.
I've blogged before about the "last mile" problem in government: the fact the structure of government in the US means a gap between government and the citizen. Here's another example, as reported by Politico:
The Treasury Department said Wednesday that state and local governments had disbursed just over 10 percent of federal rental assistance funds as of the end of July, indicating that millions could be at risk of losing their homes once eviction protections end.
Sec. Vilsack is announcing additional programs to aid producers impacted by the pandemic.
My impression of the various programs which have authorized spending in response to the pandemic and its effect is that several of them have had big problems in getting the money out the door. Some of the programs have struggled to get the money out; others have perhaps been vulnerable to fraud.
Those are impressions only. Meanwhile I'm following the FSA employee group on Facebook. I likely suffer from the old-timer's presumption that the newcomers have it easier, but I try to resist that snap judgment. On the one hand, I'm very impressed by the variety of programs, some directed to people FSA has long served, some directed to new groups, which the counties have had to deal with. On the other hand I remember PIK in 1983 and particulary the disaster program in 1986 (IIRC) which hit in the midst of the System/36 automation.
I hope someday somebody, GAO or Congress, does a high level review of the government's operations, their speed, efficiency, and weaknesses. My expectation and hope is that FSA would do well in such a review, largely because of a long history in dealing with crash programs and, most importantly, the county offices deal directly with the people, a big contrast with most of the rest of government which has to try to operate through state and county government agencies, and/or NGOs.
I posted earlier on nuclear reactions as a metaphor possibly explaining the rise in murders recently. The key point is the reactivity--when the population becomes younger for whatever reason (baby boom, oldsters observing lockdowns, oldsters dying from covid) the interactions among people change a bit without the cushioning effect of the older. A similar logic could apply to the pandemic--as more people are vaccinated, the reactivity goes down.
I came across a new metaphor today in a discussion of the effects of the vaccine. The metaphor is wood, as in forest fires. If the wood is very dry it catches fire easily, if there's been rain it doesn't. From that perspective the vaccine has the effect of dampening the wood.
A separate metaphor was poison--in a Post story explaining vaccination, the point is that the vaccine isn't binary, like shutting the door on the virus. It's more like a poison. So when the body is infected, the virus attacks and is multiplying, but then it starts to encounter the poison (as the immune system ramps up). The virus starts to be poisoned, reducing its reproduction rate. So testing may give a positive test during the time the virus is in its struggle with the immune system, as hopefully it's in its death throes.
About a third of the way into Michael Lewis's "The Premonition", which so far describes the development of the pandemic plan in the Bush administration, through the linking of people from different government agencies and a high schooler's science project.
On page 78 he writes:
"Inside the United States government were all these little boxes. The boxes had been created to address specific problems as they arose. 'How to ensure our food is safe to eat,' for instance, or how to avoid a run on banks'..." He goes on to describe the people inside the boxes as knowledgeable and talented, developing a culture around the box, but frozen inside the box with little interest in other boxes.
For me the "box" is a "silo", which includes the "stakeholders" in Congress and NGO's as well as the civil servatns, but the description otherwise rings true.
Long discussion in Post of the possible causes for increase in murders this year in America (not occurring elsewhere if article is right).
Thinking of a metaphor for human society--as a nuclear reactor, with police as the control rods absorbing or not the excess neutrons, thereby damping or permitting greater interactions.
One might expand the applicability of the metaphor to the pandemic, with the control rods being the vaccines, masks, lockdowns, etc.
You'd have to expand the discussion to include the rates of the radioactivity of the alternative materials which could be used for a reactor. (I'd assume that radium, for example, could explode given the right setup.)
Back to homicide--it seems to me one effect of the pandemic likely has been to change the characteristics of the public, those who are active in exchanges with others. During the past year the "public" has become younger and poorer as the old and the better-off have been much better able to reduce their time in public. That might well mean that the remaining "public" is more reactive, somewhat as if the uranium was more highly enriched.
We're far enough along in our covid vaccination process to discuss patterns, as my cousin and I did this morning. It turns out the Northeast, especially New England, is doing the best. Early leaders like WV or NM have fallen back.
I'm not sure what accounts for New England's record. They voted for Biden, so that's a plus. My impression is that they're well-educated and perhaps have a higher regard for science than average. But what accounts for SD's presence high up the list?
I wonder if anyone has run a correlation between the states which do well with the annual flu vaccinations and the current effort?
Here's a graph of all the states for the 2019-20 flu vaccine. Eyeballing there seems a correlation, though Maine is an exception. When the dust settles we'll see whether there's a pattern of general resistance/acceptance of all vaccines, or whether the unique factors of covid-19 played a role in acceptance.
This was an interesting twitter thread--the gist is that herd immunity does not mean the apex of the curve of covid infections.
This is an image from one of the tweets:
“Major policy decisions”? Do we know what that means? There’s a standard of economic impact of $100 million for regulations–but that’s been unchanged since it was first adopted in the 1970s in relation to inflation concerns, not policy.
Arguable the USDA/Trump decision to spend billions from the Commodity Credit Corporation was a major policy decision. But it wasn’t particularly controversial, because it was too esoteric and there were no significant opposing voices to make a fuss. https://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2020/01/21/trump-tariff-aid-to-farmers-cost-more-than-us-nuclear-forces/?sh=4fe7a4966c50
I suspect the operational definition is an issue about which there’s a big fight between the parties and/or interest groups. I think the reality is such issues don’t get resolved in legislation, just kicked down the road to the faceless bureaucrats who can be blamed if they screw up and/or offend people.