A follow-up to the DeSantis vs. Disney column. Nick Papantonis of Orlando’s WFTV describes the economic consequences of Florida’s decision to take away Disney’s protected tax status.  In a Twitter thread, he says that DeSantis’ actions have given Disney a $163 million/year tax break while passing on to the two counties that hold Disney’s Reedy Creek tax jurisdiction more than $1 billion of municipal debt.
Also, once Reedy Creek goes away as a jurisdiction, Orange and Osceola counties will be responsible for providing all of the services (fire, police, roadwork) that Disney currently provides. And those counties won’t be able to pay for the additional services by raising sales taxes or impact fees.
So, they will have to raise property taxes. By law, they must tax all properties equally (not just Disney) and it’s expected that the county mil rate for property tax computation in Orange County will rise as much as 25% next June.
Florida has just 12 counties where Biden won in 2020. DeSantis has cleverly managed to screw the residents in two of them. Orange was 61-38 for Biden, Osceola was 56-43. The residents, by the way, had no say in DeSantis’ Murder Mickey vote. They will likely have no say in their property taxes going through the roof. But they are likely to see their communities come close to financial ruin.
In a way, the outcome is a perfect encapsulation of the 2022 Republican Party: Take more from Joe Sixpack while the corporations that are ostensibly the target of their moral outrage, walk away with the money. Oh, and screw a few Blue counties. On to cartoons.
Anyone else thinking that our national party bus is about to stall out in the slow lane on America’s Boulevard of Broken Dreams?
Here’s an under-the-radar story: In 2020, the Trump administration hatched a plan to gradually transition traditional Medicare over to private firms. It’s called Direct Contracting (DC) and is operated by Direct Contracting Entities (DCEs). Currently, there are 53 of them in Phase One of an experimental program operated by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS).
Under the program, the DCEs receive a fixed amount of money annually to cover care for each traditional Medicare enrollee whose primary care doctor (or group) has signed up with that DCE. The DCEs must pay for all of the care of those people assigned to them. To date, the CMS has auto-assigned hundreds of thousands of people to DCEs.
Since no one on Medicare has voluntarily signed up to work with a DCE, it’s unlikely they know of, nor understand what’s happening. And the CMS doesn’t require DCEs to tell people that they have the right to opt-out.
The idea behind DCEs is to shift a portion of the financial risk of the elderly’s medical care away from traditional Medicare by capping the payments to a third party that’s responsible to pay for it. This is the latest in many efforts by CMS and Congress to control the rising costs of healthcare.
Wrongo and Ms. Right have recently noticed a blizzard of direct mail offers to convert our traditional Medicare to an all-in insurance program. It’s probable that some of these are from DCEs.
The anticipated advantage of the DCE experiment is that Medicare’s out-of-pocket costs will be capped. The DCEs contract with CMS is for an agreed-upon annual payment. They have to pay for care and also make a profit based on that fixed revenue amount from the government. In addition to the normal profits from providing services, DCEs can keep as much as 40% of the money they don’t spend on care.
But there’s no such thing as a free lunch, and it seems to Wrongo that this creates yet another financial incentive to deny otherwise necessary treatments. It’s possible that the DCEs could pay doctors to steer patients away from specialty care. This means that someone enrolled in a DCE has reason to worry that their primary care doctor might limit their access to more costly care.
Congress did not authorize the wholesale overhaul of traditional Medicare, so why is this happening? And so far, the Biden administration appears to be willing to continue playing Trump’s cards.
Many of the DCEs are owned by Private Equity (PE) firms. It doesn’t take a chess master to see that the PE firms will ultimately sell out to the insurance industry. And it wouldn’t be a big leap from that to fully privatize Medicare.
Time to wake up America! Did we elect Biden to privatize Medicare? The word “privatize” should scare the hell out of Americans. But unfortunately they’ve been fooled into believing that by some magic miracle of economics, it’s to their benefit.
This was an easy business decision for Spotify. They picked the popular podcaster Rogan with the $100 million-plus exclusive deal, over the cranky 76-year-old rocker whose last gold album was nearly two decades ago. Someone who hasn’t been on the Billboard charts since 1982.
Joni Mitchell and Dave Grohl have now said they will follow Young in leaving Spotify.
Let’s watch and listen to Neil Young playing “Hey Hey, My My” at Farm Aid in Champaign, Illinois on September, 1985. Young is a co-founder and board member of Farm Aid, along with Willie Nelson and John Mellencamp:
Neil won’t burn out or fade away.
Sample Lyric: Out of the blue
and into the black
You pay for this,
but they give you that
And once you’re gone,
you can’t come back
When you’re out of the blue
and into the black.
“You pay for this, and they give you that”. Listen up Medicare!
A new Quinnipiac University Poll, conducted between January 7 – 10 of a nationwide sample of 1,313 adults shows that Americans are confused about which Party is protecting voting rights:
This is another example of poor messaging by Democrats. Republicans have been trying to suppress voting in many states, and the Republicans in Congress have prevented Democrats from passing legislation to protect the right to vote for all citizens. But only 45% say Democrats are protecting the right to vote and 43% say it’s the Republicans. That’s within the poll’s margin of error of 2.7%, meaning it’s a virtual tie.
There are only three cohorts with more than 50% saying that one Party is better. Women (52%) and Blacks (86%) say it’s the Democrats, while Whites (51%) say it’s the Republicans. It’s also interesting that 12% apparently have no opinion about which Party is better for voting rights. Whatever the reason why this poll is so close, it isn’t good for the country. On to cartoons.
Let’s vote our way out:
More GOP inflation:
Sen. Sinema is just not that into him
Are Sen. Manchin’s priorities misplaced?
Supremes reject federal government’s right to set rules for public safety:
(The mandate would have covered about 84.2 million Americans. OSHA estimated (before Omicron) that the rule would save 6,500 lives and prevent 250,000 hospitalizations over a six-month period.)
Mt. Baker, viewed from Bellingham, WA after 66” of new snow – December 2021 photo by Randy Small photography
Wrongo tested positive for Covid on Christmas Day, despite being vaxxed and boosted. When he asked if it was Omicron or Delta, the hospital didn’t know, saying that the test might be selected randomly for further genetic testing. That means it’s highly doubtful any facility in Connecticut can separate Delta and Omicron patients. In fact, most places wouldn’t have the resources to do that, even if they wanted to.
So, while recovering here at the Mansion of Wrong, we’ve tried to take the required precautions, including cancelling family events, informing those who we had spent time with earlier that week, and masking indoors. One family friend who was with us last week, just texted to say that his 3.5 year old grandson whom he babysat for after seeing us, just tested positive. It’s rampant.
We are entering year three of Covid, and the pandemic isn’t over, even though most of us believed it would be over by now. Instead, for its junior year, Covid is looking like it may shift from a pandemic to an endemic disease, one we will have to live with, possibly forever.
We have effective vaccines, but a political effort is stoking anti-Vaxx feelings in order to keep the pandemic going. Republican leaders are opposing vaccinations, wearing masks, and social distancing (even though they know these things are very effective). And their followers are well — following, by refusing vaccinations, masks, and social distancing.
Despite Covid having a roughly 2% mortality rate, they seem to be more threatened by a vaccine that has a 0.0022% mortality rate. We can ask why GOP politicians are doing this. Most of them are vaccinated. They know that refusing these measures will make people sick and will likely kill quite a few of the unvaccinated, but they don’t seem to care.
They understand that a continuing pandemic could make Biden a one-term president. A continuing pandemic may help Republicans retake the House and Senate in 2022. Nobody likes a loser, and they think the majority of voters will blame Biden for the continuing pandemic.
The numbers are against Biden. America’s now at 821,000 dead. Unless we get very lucky, in another 100 days, we’ll be somewhere between 920,000 and 1,000,000, because since August, we have averaged more than 1,500 deaths/day. Unless the daily deaths change, we’re headed to a million dead by spring.
Republicans are going to use this fact to attack Biden, saying that he’s handled Covid worse than Trump did, because there are more deaths on his watch.
Republicans have done everything possible to prolong Covid and to slow or prevent the implementation of measures that would have lowered the death toll. It’s like an arsonist complaining about the fire department not putting out fires fast enough. The idea that Covid vaccinations should be treated as a matter of individual consumer preference is absolutely brain-dead Republican nihilism.
The NYT reports that where people are dying of Covid also has changed since vaccines became widely available: (emphasis by Wrongo)
“Death rates fell in most counties across the country, and in about one in five counties, the death rate fell by more than half. But in about one in 10 counties, death rates have more than doubled.”
Now, ten percent of counties doesn’t equal ten percent of the population. Here’s the map provided by the Times:
Note the concentration in Kentucky and West Virginia. The latest data from the CDC, based on data from 25 states and cities, shows that the death rate for unvaccinated people is 14 times higher than that for vaccinated people. The article also includes a map where Covid deaths have decreased. You can view it here. In most ways, it fills in the blank areas on the map above with green cones instead of these red cones.
We’ve been at this for two long years. Now starting year three, maddeningly, the issues remain the same: The health care system is running out of resources. People can’t get tested. Some people refuse to help themselves and their neighbors. New variants can emerge in the wild faster than we can develop remedies, particularly when people won’t avail themselves of the remedies we already have.
There will be end of year reports on the good things that happened in 2021. There will be reports on both the good and bad things to come in 2022. One thing that doesn’t seem likely to be in any of those reports is a changed reaction to Covid by Americans.
Time to put 2021 in the dumpster.
Happy New Year! Thanks for riding with Wrongo for another year. Raise a glass, knowing that we will try our damnedest to make sense of it all again in 2022. Let’s close with “Auld Lang Syne” performed by The Choral Scholars of University College Dublin: (hat tip to Monty)
Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge, NV – November 2021 photo by Marcia Steen
Today is the 58th anniversary of the assassination of President John Kennedy. While it wasn’t the first time Americans dove deep into conspiracy theories, who killed JFK has always been a controversial topic surrounded by conspiracy theories since that November day.
Over the weekend, we passed a sad milestone. The number of US Covid deaths in 2021 surpassed the deaths in 2020 and we still have a month to go. So far, there have been 385,457 deaths this year vs. 385,343 in 2020 according to the WSJ.
Wrongo has a few observations about what our continuing saga with Covid says about America. Almost 200 million of us are fully vaccinated. In addition, we have had 47 million confirmed cases to date. That means 74.8% of us have some level of antibodies to the several variants of Covid that have traveled through our population in the past two years.
But because: 1) Vaccines haven’t made it beyond the rich world (only 6% of the population in Africa is vaccinated) and 2) Americans seem to value the freedom to control their bodies over public health, new variants that may not be controllable by current vaccines could infiltrate the US.
There’s one very concerning new variant, B.1.640. It appears to be from Africa and has only been seen in small numbers. Apparently it’s bad. The Jerusalem Post mentioned it in” New COVID variant found in France: Reason for panic or not quite yet?” after it spread to Europe:
“A new COVID variant identified in a handful of European countries is raising concerns among some health professionals because there are changes to the coronavirus spike protein that have never been seen before.”
The B.1.640 variant has nothing to do with Delta. Researchers have had a really hard time placing it on the known Covid family tree, because it’s so far removed from anything else, that it just sits on a very long branch of its own. They think that it may elude our current vaccines.
If true, this would be another example of viral evolution completely blindsiding us. And if it isn’t this one, we’ll probably see some other variant.
The sad truth is that America is no longer willing to fight Covid. We think its too hard, and we don’t like doing difficult things. Too many of us don’t want to choose between public health and our economy.
Our unofficial policy is to expect that Covid will become a gradually declining annual infection. But that’s based on the assumption that we have a successful vaccine, that the current variant is all we’ll see, and that the virus will lose its potency over time.
Nobody dares say it out loud, but Covid has revealed the US to be a prime risk for a bioweapon attack.
If a terror group, or an adversary country decided to launch a biological attack, there is clearly nothing that we would do to stop it. How do we know that? Because Covid could have been a biological attack, and it was allowed to spread broadly instead of being properly dealt with. Because it was “too hard” to try to stop it.
We’ve spent countless $ trillions over the last 20 years for “national security”, and this is where we’ve gotten to? Wrongo is starting to think that Churchill’s comment that “the US will do the right thing, after we’ve tried everything else” was overly optimistic.
Time to wake up America! We’ve got to toughen up, or face defeat, not only on the battlefield but in ICUs across America. To help you wake up, here’s a throwback song from another era. Listen to “I’d Love to Change the World” by the late Alvin Lee & his group, Ten Years After from their 1971 Album: “A Space In Time.”
The video doesn’t feature the band, just the song from the album. The video is a film student project that Wrongo likes. Overall, the song  looks at what were considered the biggest problems in the world in 1971: Overpopulation, economic inequality, pollution, and war. Unsurprisingly, the issues remain the same:
Sample Lyric:
Everywhere is freaks and hairies
Dykes and fairies, tell me where is sanity
Tax the rich, feed the poor
Till there are no rich no more
I’d love to change the world
But I don’t know what to do
So I’ll leave it up to you
“US service members should have the right to refuse the military’s COVID-19 vaccination requirement on conscientious grounds, the Catholic Church’s Archdiocese for the Military Services said Tuesday.”
“The Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines were tested using an abortion-derived cell line. That type of a link has been for centuries considered remote material cooperation with evil and is never sinful. The Johnson & Johnson vaccine was developed, tested, and is produced, with abortion-derived cell lines. That vaccine is, therefore, more problematic.”
That’s the Catholic Church’s overriding position on Covid vaccines. Since the military has the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines available, no military member needs to take the J&J shot. Where Archbishop Broglio goes off the rails is with this:
“….no one should be forced to receive a COVID-19 vaccine if it would violate the sanctity of his or her conscience.
Individuals possess the “civil right not to be hindered in leading their lives in accordance with their consciences.”
Even if an individual’s decision seems erroneous or inconsistent to others, conscience does not lose its dignity. This belief permeates Catholic moral theology as well as First Amendment jurisprudence. As stated by the United States Supreme Court, “[R]eligious beliefs need not be acceptable, logical, consistent, or comprehensible to others in order to merit First Amendment protection.”
So, every Catholic in the military has a vaccination hall pass from the Archbishop from taking a vaccine that is “never sinful”? The curious thing is that Catholics are the most vaccinated group in the US, according to a recent national survey by the Pew Research Center.
Should religious exemptions from vaccine mandates really be a thing? Exceptions were designed to protect religious faith. But where vaccines are concerned, they often seem to be used in bad faith, as a way to get around complying with a public health requirement.
Some Constitutional history from Wired: The First Amendment restricts the government from prohibiting the “free exercise” of religion. For much of our history, there were no religious exemptions from secular laws that applied to everyone. As the Supreme Court observed in 1879, “To permit this would be to make the professed doctrines of religious belief superior to the law of the land, and in effect to permit every citizen to become a law unto himself.”
Congress couldn’t tell you what to believe, the Court ruled, but it can tell you what to do.
By the early 1970s, the justices carved out space for religious exemptions. They ruled that if a superficially neutral law conflicted with a religious command, the government would have to meet the “strict scrutiny” test by showing that it had a “compelling interest” in enforcing the law.
In 1990, the Court narrowed its thinking. In a case involving members of a Native American Church who took peyote as part of religious ceremonies, the Court held that religion doesn’t give someone the right to challenge a “generally applicable” law. Ruling otherwise, wrote the conservative Catholic Justice Antonin Scalia, “would open the prospect of constitutionally required exemptions from civic obligations of almost every conceivable kind.” An example of a civic obligation that Scalia cited for his slippery-slope argument: compulsory vaccination laws.
In fact, religious opposition to vaccines is rare. In 2013, John D. Grabenstein, a vaccinologist and practicing Catholic, surveyed a wide range of world religions and couldn’t find any that had anti-vaccine teachings, except for the Christian Scientists, who teach that the material world, including disease, is an illusion. And the way to overcome disease is through prayer, not medicine or vaccination.
In the 1960s and ’70s, as vaccine mandates for diseases like measles and polio proliferated, a wave of state laws enabled religious opt-outs. Today, 48 states and the District of Columbia allow some form of exemption.
As Aaron Blake asks in the WaPo: How long before Republicans’ coronavirus vaccine skepticism and anti-mandate fervor makes the next logical jump – to the other vaccines that have been mandated for many years?
It’s already happened. Ohio Congressman Jim Jordan tweeted:
“Ohio should ban all vaccine mandates”
Jordan supposedly is vaccinated. But apparently, he wants not only Covid, but whooping cough and measles to be spread as far and wide as possible.
It seems likely that the US will end up with fewer vaccine requirements in some places than we had before this pandemic that has killed over 700,000 people. You know, the one that we have vaccines for.
We live in a country where there’s no agreement on what constitutes the common good.
“Republican legislators in more than half of US states, spurred on by voters angry about lockdowns and mask mandates, are taking away the powers state and local officials use to protect the public against infectious diseases.”
KHN found that at least 26 states pushed through laws that permanently weaken government authority to protect public health. The actions varied but included these:
In 16 states, legislators have limited the power of public health officials to order mask mandates, quarantines, or isolation. In some cases, they gave themselves or local elected politicians the authority to prevent the spread of infectious disease.
At least 17 states passed laws banning Covid vaccine mandates or made it easier to get around vaccine requirements.
At least 9 states have new laws banning or limiting mask mandates. Executive orders or a court ruling limit mask requirements in five more.
Here’s a map showing where these assaults on public health are happening:
Draft legislation created by the American Legislative Exchange Council, restricting the emergency powers of governors and other officials, has inspired dozens of state-level bills, according to KHN. In some states, governors can no longer institute mask mandates or close businesses, and their executive orders can be overturned by legislators.
This toxic stew has led at least 303 public health leaders to retire, resign or be fired since the pandemic began. That means 1 in 5 Americans have lost a local health leader during the pandemic, when many hospitals are full, and people are still dying in large numbers.
This is America in 2021: It’s vitally important to the freedom of True Americans™ that the government be prevented from doing anything to help or protect them, except for cutting taxes.
We live in a dysfunctional democracy, and that seems to be the way we like it. No evil deity could have done better at setting us up to fail.
There are two big ideas that are colliding in the weakening of state-level public health and the subsequent loss of public health officials. One is the doctrine of federalism, our system of government in which the same territory is controlled by two levels of government. The US Constitution has established a system of “dual sovereignty,” under which the States have surrendered some of their powers to the federal government, but also retained sovereignty in others.
These 26 states are using federalism, asserting their power over federal regulations and processes that are designed to keep people safe. It’s unclear what the federal government can do to reverse these actions.
The second big idea is: what are the foundational goals of government? The safety, health and longevity of our people should be the primary metrics for good governance. The decline in the quality of our governance shows clearly in the American people’s decline in both health and longevity.
Public health as a function has been in decline for decades. This attack on public health is the latest step in the systematic effort to discredit the profession, to box it in. Few in public health have direct power; most are working on social/environmental research, information sharing, and creating best practices in regulation of product and worker safety.
Our dysfunctional democracy got that way by catering to corporations and wealthy donors. Politicians are disinvested in the American people; they have disinvested from creating what should be a fair sharing of social gains.
This makes them anti-public health. To the extent they have any interest, it’s in public health’s policing powers, like the bounty hunter policy that’s been enacted in Texas.
But, today’s Saturday, and it’s a legal requirement for this column to help readers find a few moments to leave the clash of cultures behind and relax for at least a few minutes. Leaves are starting to fall on the fields of Wrong, and next week marks the end of summer. We’ve placed a few mums around the yard, and Wrongo got around to calling the shop that’s fixing his snowblower for an update.
“According to a new working paper released by the National Bureau of Economic Research, Americans now die earlier than their European counterparts, no matter what age you’re looking at.”
Covid deaths are excluded from the study.
Before the 1990s, average life expectancy in the US was not much different than it was in Germany, the United Kingdom, or France. But since the 1990s, American life spans leveled off, and then fell behind those in similarly wealthy European countries.
We started hearing about America’s declining longevity when Anne Case’s and Angus Deaton’s 2015 study showed that White mortality in the US was rising. They called the new trend “deaths of despair”, caused by increased deaths by suicide, drug overdose and liver disease associated with alcohol.
Now, the bad trend has spread to all Americans:
“Compared with Europeans, American babies are more likely to die before they turn 5, American teens are more likely to die before they turn 20, and American adults are more likely to die before they turn 65. At every age, living in the United States carries a higher risk of mortality.”
The study collected data on American life spans by ethnicity and by income at the county level, and compared the data to those of European countries, locality by locality, allowing for direct comparisons. It explodes the myth about America having the best medical outcomes.
More from Thompson:
“Americans are more likely to kill one another with guns, in large part because Americans have more guns than residents of other countries do. Americans die more from car accidents, not because our fatality rate per mile driven is unusually high but because we simply drive so much more than people in other countries.”
Americans also have higher rates of death from infectious disease and pregnancy complications. And all of this is over and above our terrible Covid death rate.
One reason for the differences in mortality is that unlike Europe, America doesn’t have a robust public health system. These systems are at their core, a multidisciplinary delivery of services in our towns and cities that work to solve health problems before they require hospitalizations.
The US public health system has significant gaps in capability and delivery. It is both fragmented, and weak politically. The politicization of public health in the Covid crisis has caused some local public health officials to quit or retire. Some have been physically threatened just for doing their jobs. Approximately 1 in 6 public health officials have left their jobs in the past 18 months.
By contrast, our European peers have robust public health service delivery in most locations.
The researchers found some significant findings. First, Europe’s mortality rates do not vary much between rich and poor communities. Residents of the poorest parts of France live about as long as people in the rich areas around Paris. From the study:
“Health improvements among infants, children, and youth have been disseminated within European countries in a way that includes even the poorest areas…”
Second, White Americans living in the richest 5% of counties still die earlier than Europeans in low-poverty areas:
“It says something negative about the overall health system of the US that even after we grouped counties by poverty and looked at the richest 10th percentile, and even the richest fifth percentile, we still saw this longevity gap between Americans and Europeans…”
The study also shows that Europeans in impoverished areas seem to live longer than Black or White Americans in the richest 10% of counties.
Third, America has a surprising US longevity success story: In the three decades before Covid, average life spans for Black Americans surged, in rich and poor areas, and across all ages. As a result, the Black-White life-expectancy gap decreased by almost half, from seven years to 3.6 years.
The study credits the Medicaid expansion in the 1990s, which covered pregnant women and children and likely improved Black Americans’ access to medical treatments. The expansion of the earned-income tax credit and other financial assistance have gradually reduced poverty. Air pollution reduction is also a factor. Black Americans have been more likely than White Americans to live in more-polluted areas, but air pollution has declined more than 70% percent since the 1970s, according to the EPA.
Let’s give the last word to Derek Thompson: (emphasis by Wrongo)
“For decades, US politicians on the right have resisted calls for income redistribution and universal insurance under the theory that inequality was a fair price to pay for freedom. But now we know that the price of inequality is paid in early death—for Americans of all races, ages, and income levels. With or without a pandemic, when it comes to keeping Americans alive, we really are all in this together.”
Sunset and sunflowers, central UT – August 2021 photo by Jon Hafen
Schools are back in session and once again, it’s in person, after a confusing on-or-off, virtual or physical experience last year. Almost 5 million children have been diagnosed with COVID-19 since the pandemic began.
The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) reports that about 204,000 kids tested positive for Covid last week. And for the week ending August 26, children accounted for 22.4% of reported weekly cases. Covid cases are rising nearly everywhere in America, and our schools aren’t exempt. From USA Today:
“At least 1,000 schools across 35 states have closed for in-person learning because of COVID-19 since the beginning of the school year, according to Burbio, a New York-based data service that is tracking K-12 school reopening trends.”
This increasing number of school closures comes amid a battle over mask mandates in schools and the surge in pediatric Covid cases. Did it occur to you that the people bitching about mask mandates and refusing to get the vaccine are THE SAME ONES who are up to a million about exiting Afghanistan?
Republicans are saying that Biden has botched the Covid response. But we know that many Republican governors are actively pursuing policies that are increasing infections. Some of them are preventing schools from adopting mask policies. Dr. Eric Feigl Ding, an epidemiologist, tweeted this:
Moreover, the CDC says that hospitalization rates were 10 times higher among unvaccinated than among fully vaccinated adolescents, and increased 4 times as fast in August in states with low vs. high vaccination rates:
Would Republican politicians willingly sabotage their state’s Covid vaccine program for political gain? Before you say, “that’s ridiculous”, look at this note sent to people in Manatee County FL:
This was put out by a local MAGA group, whose leaders have been trained by national organizers on how to disrupt school board meetings.
Wrongo thinks that masks are a convenient target of opportunity for America’s angry and outraged. Being an angry, outraged White person pays big political dividends. Chances are that if you’re an angry American, you’re White and middle class. You are backed by an enormous right-wing media ecosystem that’s egging you on. You are part of a political party ready to overturn our current system of government on your behalf.
Many in law enforcement will police you selectively. You can disrupt school board meetings, scream at children in masks, and probably not even get your ass thrown out of the meeting. The maskholes are ascendant.
And so, America’s war with ourselves continues.
The CDC’s masking recommendation for vaccinated adults changes with local transmission rates. If high, all people should mask indoors. If low, there’s no need. But the CDC hasn’t set similar metrics for children and masks in schools.
So, should kids under 12 stay masked until they have an approved vaccine? What if that takes years? What if it’s approved soon, but only 35% of them get vaccinated, just like among the 12–15-year-olds who have had access to vaccines for months?
It’s possible that even by the end of the school year, most children will still be unvaccinated. Should the masks come off then, or remain in place indefinitely? Any school board that sets a mask mandate should also be setting in place a mask off plan. Otherwise, their angry and distrustful citizens will gain even more power.
Consider that in the UK, the government doesn’t require masks for children in schools. It isn’t clear whether they will advise that kids should get vaccinated. Britain has experts just like we do, and they’re looking at the same scientific data. They care about children’s health the same way we do, and yet, they have come to different policy decisions.
Should we, as the UK does, accept that there will be more cases in children, recognizing that disease severity for the vast majority of kids is low? Should we accept that there will be a not-insignificant number of Covid-related deaths among our kids, along with some who have long-term health compromises, and move our focus to vaccinating, not masking our kids?
At this point, the people who are anti-vaccine, anti-mask and/or who deny the deadly seriousness of Covid have demonstrated that they cannot be reasoned with. They love that they can be ignorant assholes, while still having plenty of political muscle.
Time and energy are as limited as ICU beds. Time and energy should be reserved for people who have at least some common sense and common decency, not wasted on the angry and outraged.
Portage Glacier, outside Whittier, AK – August 2021 photo by nowake
Yesterday, Wrongo finished Michael Lewis’s book “The Premonition”, that tells the story of our failure to contain COVID-19. It is told through the eyes of a cast of compelling characters, including a California public health officer, a couple of idiosyncratic MDs who are White House advisers and a brilliant academic scientist whose lab revolutionized the identification of viral pathogens.
We learn how the pandemic exploited the gaps in the public health system of the world’s most advanced country that Lewis shows to be fragmented and weak politically. Moreover, he shows that the CDC’s response was almost inert when it came to reports from the states that were seeing the first Covid cases.
Early on, the CDC basically had two positions on the pandemic. First, that it wasn’t a big deal, it was overblown. And later, they made a quick pivot when it started spreading in the US. That change came far too late to contain the spread of the virus.
Lewis says little in The Premonition about the US official pandemic response. The organization that comes off the worst is the CDC and its leadership. The White House and Trump are mentioned in passing. Dr. Fauci is mentioned only a few times, while Deborah Birx is entirely absent. The White House COVID task force is seldom mentioned.
The book’s takeaway is mostly about how we have built organizations that are excellent for studying “what happened” and publishing papers about past problems. But are incapable of real time response in a true public health emergency. This is because the top CDC job has been a political appointee since the Carter administration. Lewis told NPR how the institutional failure at the CDC came about:
“The brave ones have all got their heads chopped off. So, it’s sort of institutionalized a cowardice that we’re going to need to face up to so that this business of punishing people who are doing their damnedest to try to save us from ourselves has got to stop.”
The characters in Lewis’s book have fascinating life stories: A thirteen-year-old girl’s school science project on how airborne pathogens spread, morphs with her scientist father’s help, into an important model of how Covid spreads.
A California public-health officer uses her skills and experience to see what the CDC misses and reveals important truths about our public health system. An informal group of doctors, nicknamed the Wolverines, have the skills needed to fight the pandemic: brilliant backgrounds, world-class labs, prior experience with the bird and swine flus  ̶  everything except official permission to implement their findings on behalf of the American people.
One series of facts that floored Wrongo was how important children are to spreading a virus in our population. These insights started with the kid’s model mentioned above. From pages 90-91:
“…there were more than 100,000 K-12 [public] schools in the country, with 50 million children in them. Twenty-five million ride a bus to school….There were 70,000 buses in the entire US public transportation system, but 500,000 school buses. On an average day, school buses carried twice as many people as the entire US public transportation system.”
Moreover, school bus aisles are narrower than normal buses, and better for spreading disease. They observed that when kids stand at the bus stop, they crowd together, unlike adults who give each other personal space. In the halls at school, kids also crowd together. The conclusion was that kids’ different sense of personal space has a key role in the spread of viral disease. More:
“…each elementary school child spent the day in a space with a radius of just 3.5 feet, which when they reached high school, expanded to four.”
The discoverer of this insight is one of the Wolverines, Carter Mecher, an MD who worked at the Atlanta VA hospital system. His conclusion?
“I couldn’t have designed a better system for transmitting disease than our school system”
Wrongo didn’t know that school closure was the most effective strategy to contain the spread of Covid before reading this book. We all know that few families wanted their kids to stay home from school. We know how politicized the issue of school closure became, even in states where it was mandated. There are 130,930 schools in America, all individually and locally managed. And it’s impossible to enforce a mandate on them from afar.
Between a weak public health system, an ossified CDC, and an inability to control the disease transmission in the 130k+ schools in America, Lewis’s book is a devastating look at our ability to deal with Covid and with whatever the next pandemic brings.
With Afghanistan, the delta variant and a looming hurricane hitting the northeast this weekend, it will be difficult to settle down for a Saturday Soother. But let’s give it a try.
Take a seat by a window and listen to “The Last Rose of Summer” by Leroy Anderson. It is part of his Irish Suite, and was arranged in 1947:
