Why, Þis Is COVID. Nor Are We Over It
BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2022-02-14 Mo
CONDITION: Drought:
Next to no rain in January or February here in California:
Why, This Is COVID. Nor Are We Over It:
Heartbreaking:
Eric Topol: Where Do We Stand with Omicron?: ‘50% effectiveness for the booster (vs Omicron)… associated with 10-fold more breakthrough infections than seen with… Delta…. [Nevertheless,] a booster is essential for preventing severe disease, hospitalization and deaths…. Hospitalizations… 88, 89, and 90 for booster effectiveness vs Omicron… compared with 2 shots (44–68%)… quite durable (83–90%) after 3 months…. We’re very lucky. Damn lucky…. [In] the United States… hospitalizations have soared to a new record, ICU admits are close to their pre-vaccination phase peak, and deaths are again on a steep rise (nearly 4,000 reported yesterday, one of the highest for the US pandemic). These severe disease outcomes are likely a function of very low vaccination rates (63%) and booster rate (24%)…
LINK:
National dysfunction relative to what we wish were our peer societies on an absolutely amazing level—and all because some people want to sell ads, and others think there is political advantage to be gained by further misleading their base of the easily-grifted.
California looks, luckily, to be about two-thirds of the way from the U.S. average to Canada (although, needless to say, nowhere near the effectiveness of Australia or Japan): actually wearing masks, trying to stay six-feet apart inside, and not being dorks about places with low ventilation is worth a lot.
The most heartbreaking thing is how weak, among the easily-grifted, the “I should get vaccinated and boosted to keep from giving it to my elderly and immunocompromised neighbors” thread is. True psychopathy.
Consider: On September 26, 2020, now-Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett allowed the Trump White House to host a crowded party for her. The risks to her from having this nomination party were not that large. But, approximately, 30 people caught COVID-19 at that party.
With a fourteen-day infection cycle, those 30 then gave it to 50 in mid-October, who then gave it to 80 in early November, who then gave it to 150 at the end of November, who then gave it to 200 more in mid-December, 200 in early-January, and 200 in mid-January. Then it drops off—another 620 between then and now.
A total of 1530 people.
And that’s if the guests at Amy Coney Barrett’s party and their contacts behaved like normal Americans. They may not have—it might be much, much more. Or it might be much fewer: maybe their showing up for a crowded indoor party was a one-time thing, and they thought better of their behavior and changed after they left the party.
Odds are that, of those 1530 people, 15 are now dead. 15 people who would now be alive had Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett said “I don’t think that’s a great idea” when having a big party for her was mooted. Maybe it is more—maybe the chains of infection went to elderly Trumpists. Maybe it is less—maybe a good many of those who got infected would have gotten the disease anyway in the winter or the future, and that for many of the 15 it just cut their life short by 4 months or so. I can’t tell.
But 15 is the number to keep in your head. Amy Coney Barrett, I guarantee, does not think of herself as some ca. 1450 Mexica priestess watching her hench-priests sacrifice 15 people with obsidian knives on one of the pyramids of Tenochtitlan to celebrate her ascendancy to power.
Does she know their names? Does she light fifteen candles every Sunday, and pray on her knees that if any of those fifteen died unshriven that their sins descend upon her rather than upon them?
Somehow I doubt it…
One Audio:
Danielle Allen: Our Declaration: ‘Danielle Allen… discusses this critical moment in the future of building a multiracial democracy and ways to guide us to the other side of our current crisis of faith in democracy. This program is part of the Created Equal and Breathing Free podcast series presented in partnership with Florida Humanities…
LINK: <https://thefulcrum.us/big-picture/Leadership/danielle-allen-harvard>
One Picture:
Very Briefly Noted:
Izabella Kaminska: Welcome to the Blind Spot <https://the-blindspot.com/welcome-to-the-blind-spot/>
Johann Hari: Your Attention Didn’t Collapse. It Was Stolen: ‘Social media and many other facets of modern life are destroying our ability to concentrate. We need to reclaim our minds while we still can… <https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/jan/02/attention-span-focus-screens-apps-smartphones-social-media>
Antonio Regalado: How Pfizer Made an Effective Anti-Covid Pill: ‘A covid pill could cut serious illnesses and help prevent the next pandemic. But it’s expensive and in short supply… <https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/02/04/1044714/pfizer-covid-pill-paxlovid-pandemic/>
Jonathan Bernstein: Congress Actually Seems to Be Working Again <https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-02-10/congress-actually-seems-to-be-working-again>
Blogtrottr: Free Realtime Rss & Atom Feed to Email Service <https://blogtrottr.com/>
Patti Waldmeir: The Perils of ‘Onboarding’ in a World of Hybrid Work<https://www.ft.com/content/6bfd40cd-0b32-4cf0-b8c0-7ab01eaea633>
Casey Michel: Tough US Actions challenge Britain to Step Up the Fight Against Kleptocracy<https://www.ft.com/content/09ba6575-a34a-4060-91b7-1885c9c720fe>
Addison Del Mastro: Occoquan, Virginia’s Embrace of Old & New
Steven Beschloss: Trump: Exploiting Racism to Save Himself
Paragraphs:
Barry Ritholtz: The Super Wealthy vs. the Merely Rich: ‘The difference between the top 1% or 10% and the bottom half of the country is relatively modest compared to this new category of super-wealthy. That has ramifications for all of society, whether people believe the nation is on the right track or not, and how policymakers might respond…
LINK: <https://ritholtz.com/2022/02/super-wealthy/>
Barry Eichengreen: America’s Not-So-Great Inflation: ‘Today… inflation expectations remain firmly anchored…. In 1973… it was entirely rational for consumers, producers, and workers to extrapolate that rate into the future…. There were absolutely no grounds for believing that the Federal Reserve would tamp it down…. In contrast to the 1970s, the Fed knows what is at stake. Having fallen behind, it is now firmly committed to catching up…
Ed Zitron: Mark Zuckerberg Is A Liar, & He’s Lying to You About the Metaverse: ‘Zuckerberg… used his vast wealth and influence to spread a non-specific metaverse gospel to distance himself from Facebook’s damage to society…. Zuckerberg is engaging with this stuff as a distraction… interview with hustle-goon Gary Vaynerchuk… actively and deliberately looking for ways to create more confusion about what his core product is and does…. Yet the media seems genuinely scared of calling [him] out…
LINK:
Noah Smith: Inflation Is Forgetting: ‘The pain from rate hikes will hopefully be temporary and limited. But the erosion of government and household debt… will be permanent, just as it was after World War 2. We are erasing some of the financial memory of the 2000s and 2010s…. I think in general this is for the best. There are a lot of things about the financial history of the last two decades that I think most Americans would like to forget…
LINK:
Daniel Ziblatt: McConnell vs. the Republican Party: ‘When democracies face political violence… mainstream parties…. Do they condemn it unambiguously and consistently? McConnell’s words were unambiguous (the good news) but he hasn’t been consistent (the bad news)…. The “semi-loyalists’ swerve”—condemning anti-democratic behavior one day, backtracking the next, being ambiguous the next…. A democracy can’t survive… when one of two major political parties behaves as a party of authoritarians or democratic semi-loyalist…
Nancy Qian: The West Must Accept Reality in Ukraine: ‘From Putin’s perspective, NATO is likely to absorb Ukraine sooner or later if it thinks that Russia will no longer fight to prevent it. But if Russia demonstrates credibly that it will fight for control of Ukraine… the West will negotiate for peace; or there will be a war that NATO will have little appetite to fight…. Credibly threatening… maximizes Putin’s chances of keeping Ukraine in Russia’s sphere of influence…. Preventing a war is the best thing that the US and its allies can do to preserve Ukraine’s well-being, if not the ideal of full independence…
Anthony Breznican & Joanna Robinson: Inside ‘The Rings of Power’: ‘Galadriel played by Morfydd Clark in Amazon’s upcoming series… is thousands of years younger, as angry and brash as she is clever, and certain that evil is looming closer than anyone realizes.…. Amazon’s show… is based… on the vast backstory he laid out in the appendices…. Five seasons will likely cost the studio well over $1 billion…
LINK: <https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2022/02/amazon-the-rings-of-power-series-first-look>
Yu Ruxin: Lin Biao: What Really Happened?: ‘Two… possibilities: [Lin Biao’s] landing failed because of technical reasons, or it was done deliberately…. A speech Deng Xiaoping later gave… [suggests] the second…. The Mongolian investigation made very clear that their speed was too fast… they didn’t let go of the fuel…. Because Lin was the vice premier, the pilot flying the plane obeyed his orders to take off…. It could be that to start off with the pilot believed Lin, but afterwards he started having doubts and because of this deliberately sabotaged the emergency landing. This is my own inference. It’s not necessarily correct…
LINK:
Claire Berlinki: The Dark Continent: ‘When the Americans step out of the picture, the great engine of European history starts up again…. The only reasonable policy available to an American president under these circumstances is to do… attempt to deter Russia… by demonstrating that the costs of such an exercise would be high…. The open question isn’t whether Biden is doing too much to deter Putin; it’s whether he’s doing too little…
LINK:
PAID SUBSCRIBER ONLY Content Below:
How Much Wealthier Are We than Our Predecessors of the Past?
I thought before I gave this that, while it was getting there, it was not yet ready for me to set in stone and publicize as my good-enough-to-be-the-final-version take on this set of issues.
Was I right?
Looking back and looking over, I wonder: Did this come off well enough to be worth letting out into the big wide world, and not just an extra for the paid subscribers?
Inflation is a rite of generational passage. It is a descendant of the Old Testament jubilee in which old debts are forgiven and old contracts expire. The inflation of the 1970s eliminated the debts of the Roaring 20s generation and made space for the Baby Boom. Our current round of inflation, which is likely to be quashed too soon, should make room for the children of the Baby Boomers.
This was common discourse in the 1970s. People with savings in money and financial instruments dreaded inflation. People who owned tangible assets were less worried. People who owned little but worked for a living and hoped, someday, to own things would gripe but realized that inflation could work to their benefit at least until the financial class cracked down.