Month: December 2021

Over at the Atlantic, Matthew Walther has a piece today about life during the pandemic:

Where I Live, No One Cares About COVID

Outside the world inhabited by the professional classes in a handful of major metropolitan areas, many Americans are leading their lives as if COVID is over.

The title is not clickbait: Walther argues explicitly that nobody in his rural Michigan community cares a whit about COVID. Nobody wears a mask, nobody avoids crowds, nobody gets tested, nobody ducks play dates for their kids, etc. Presumably some substantial number of people have gotten vaccinated, but otherwise Walther claims that everyone leads normal lives even though COVID is about as deadly now as it's ever been.

Walther is getting massively dragged on Twitter for this, but I was kind of fascinated by his piece since I happened to write something similar just a few days ago:

I suspect that part of the public anxiety over COVID is due to the gigantic mismatch between rhetoric and reality. We are told loudly and often about how bad the COVID pandemic is. We have mask mandates, vaccination mandates, travel restrictions, business shutdowns, deep cleanings, remote schools, and constant reminders of how many people have died. And yet, the reality today is that most of us have only the tiniest sliver of a chance of dying from COVID-19.

Before commenting on Walther's views, I was first curious about whether he was actually right. That is, are lots of rural people simply leading normal lives and ignoring COVID? This is a tough one to answer, but here's something close from the Kaiser Family Foundation's tracking poll:

This doesn't report results for rural and urban, but it does report that 74% of Republicans say they are currently leading normal lives. Overall, 49% of adults say they're leading normal lives. On the other hand, there's also this:

This tells us that although concern about COVID has declined slightly since summer, about 70% of all adults are still concerned about it. This isn't surprising, since you can hardly avoid thinking about COVID given that it's splashed across practically every news broadcast.

So I'd guess that Walther is partly right and partly wrong. The behavior he sees might very well be mostly normal. However, what people feel is probably different. I'll bet there's more fear and concern about COVID in his hometown than he thinks, even if people mostly try to fit in by pretending nothing is amiss.

The funny thing about all this is that I'm closer to agreeing with Walther than I would have been a year ago. I think he's wrong about masks, which have become the great political statement of our time despite pretty good evidence that they work. However, it's also true that the best evidence seems to indicate that they have a modest effect, not a huge one.

As for all the other countermeasures, it's genuinely unclear how effective any of them are. I'm not arguing one way or the other here, just saying that the evidence isn't yet conclusive for most countermeasures. Do you remember the great Sweden Experiment? They mostly lived life normally and their infection rate was pretty high. But I kept saying I wanted to wait and see how things ended up when the pandemic was over. We're not there yet, but we're a lot further along and Sweden isn't looking so bad anymore:

Sweden is no great shakes, but they also aren't looking terrible. Wait another few months and they might even be ahead of former COVID stalwarts like Germany and Switzerland.¹

So far this has all been a bit speculative on my part, but one thing isn't: our appalling approach to closing schools. From the very beginning the evidence has suggested that closing schools was a bad idea, and that evidence has only gotten stronger over time. If there's anything that's soured the public on COVID countermeasures, this is surely it. Masks are a mild inconvenience at worst, but shutting down schools is practically existential for parents of school-age kids—not to mention the kids themselves. And the endless back-and-forth over school closures just makes it worse. Even if schools were more dangerous than they are, it's hard to believe that closing them has ever come close to balancing out the harm of keeping kids at home. Our elite class (or whatever you want to call them) wrecked their reputation big time over school closures.

This has turned into a long ramble, so let me sum up:

• Walther says everybody in his rural community has returned to their normal, non-COVID life. With a bit of allowance for hyperbole, polling evidence suggests he's probably right.
• However, it's likely that more people care about COVID than Walther thinks.
• Walther explicitly argues that all us urban liberal types have overhyped the need for cumbersome countermeasures. I think he takes this too far, but he may have a point.
• Chief among these cumbersome countermeasures has been school closures, which never should have become as widespread as they did.

I'm open to argument on all this stuff. It's basically just a brain dump of where I am right now.

¹It's worth noting that Sweden has tightened up its countermeasures since last year, which might account for some of their recent success. However, their mandates are still pretty weak compared to most countries.

This is the famous oculus in the dome of the Pantheon in Rome. It looks sort of small in this picture, but it's actually 30 feet across. It helps maintain the structural integrity of the dome by removing a considerable amount of weight that would otherwise be at its most vulnerable point.

Our story so far: The Texas legislature wanted to restrict abortions to the first six weeks of pregnancy, but sadly for them that's unconstitutional. So they brainstormed for a while until they came up with a clever workaround: instead of banning abortions outright, they authorized citizens to sue abortion clinics.

Under normal circumstances the Supreme Court would make short work of this juvenile attempt to evade judicial review, but they didn't. Instead of calling it an obvious and frivolous subterfuge, the court's conservatives stroked their chins and declared it a tricky piece of constitutional law. They let it stand until they could hold hearings and hand down a final ruling.

Liberals immediately pointed out that what was good for the goose was good for the gander. If it was OK for Texas to use this method to restrict abortion, why couldn't some blue state use it to restrict, say, gun rights? California Governor Gavin Newsom was listening:

If states can shield their laws from review by federal courts, then CA will use that authority to help protect lives.

We will work to create the ability for private citizens to sue anyone who manufactures, distributes, or sells an assault weapon or ghost gun kit or parts in CA. pic.twitter.com/YPBJ00vN6z

— Office of the Governor of California (@CAgovernor) December 12, 2021

This should be fun, assuming the legislature goes along. My only advice is to (a) do it quickly, since no one cares about the actual policy, and (b) make it as identical to the Texas law as possible. The Supreme Court's conservatives will undoubtedly jump on even the smallest difference as a reason to quash it.

Other than that, I'm all in favor of giving this a try. At the very least, it will force the court's conservatives to twist themselves into pretzels figuring out a way to claim that this is totally different from the abortion law. That should give us all a few minutes worth of chuckles.

Let's talk about the demise of democracy and how Republicans are trying to save it.

Wait. Republicans? I meant Democrats, right?

That's certainly how I see it. It's also how nearly all of you see it. But it's not the way everyone sees it. Republicans, in particular, have been convinced for a very long time that Democrats routinely steal elections. I wrote about this ten years ago in "The Dog That Voted and Other Election Fraud Yarns," and the following ten years have done nothing except cement this belief even further into the Republican psyche.

Do Republicans really believe this? Among party leaders, I don't know. Some always have. Some have convinced themselves just from saying it so often. And some probably don't but play along cynically.

Likewise, among the rank and file, some are believers and some aren't. But as time has passed, and both Fox News and party leaders have unceasingly hammered on this, more and more conservative voters have turned into believers. Trust in elections went down to a dismal 60% in 2008 and stayed there throughout the Obama years even as Republicans won landslide victories in congressional elections. It rebounded a bit during the Trump presidency, but by 2020 trust had already fallen back to about 60%. After the election it fell off a cliff:

The story behind the chart is a simple one: What do you do if Democrats routinely show disdain for fair voting? What if you've tried and tried to get them to clean up their corrupt ward bosses, fake voters, and laughable urban vote counts, but none of it has worked? Answer: You fight back harder. Because American democracy is on its last legs and someone has to do it.

So the stage was all set for Republicans to go ballistic after the 2020 election. They'd known Democrats were cheating for a long time, but never had it been this brazen. Never had Democrats managed to steal the presidency. It was time for war.

If the only way to ensure a fair vote was to restrict early voting and mail voting and other easy targets for cheating, so be it. If Democrats refused to get rid of crooked precinct counters, then Republicans would have to dive into local politics and do it themselves. And if even that wasn't enough, they'd have to reserve the right to let Republican legislatures intervene to make sure that votes were counted accurately.

Naturally, Democrats would fuss and fume and insist that it was Republicans who were playing dirty. But nobody outside their lackeys in the press actually believed that. It was all just pretense. The truth was simpler: Democrats had been all but open about their corruption for years, and in 2020 they finally went too far. Democracy—and America itself—was at stake now. If they wanted war, it was war they'd get.

A big component of inflation is consumer demand outstripping supply. One way this shows up is in a low level of inventories compared to sales volume. Here it is for four categories of goods:

As you can see, manufacturing is in good shape, and inventories of durable goods are especially strong. However, retail inventories are down substantially and auto inventories have fallen off a cliff. Overall, business inventories are down about 11%.

If anything, inventories ought to be rising at least a little bit during an economic expansion as corporations get increasingly confident about their business. But that isn't happening this time around due to supply constraints. Combine that with a big slug of money pumped into the economy at the beginning of the year and you get a big slug of inflation. When inventories catch up to demand and all that money has been spent—both of which are certain to happen—inflation will settle down.

Hilbert has become quite the good sport about playing with Charlie, but he's no spring kitten anymore and sometimes he just needs a nap. When that happens, he hops up on my desk and curls up in his box. This provides all the me-time he needs—except when someone interrupts him to take his picture, of course. Nothing in life is ever perfect.

The LA Times reports on COVID-19 among the Latino community in California:

In California, younger Latinos are dying of COVID-19 at much higher rates than their white and Asian counterparts. Younger Black people also are dying at high rates, but the disparity is starkest for Latinos....In California, Latinos ages 20 to 54 have died from COVID-19 at a rate more than eight times higher than white people in the same age group, according to a study by USC’s Department of Preventive Medicine.

The Times doesn't bother mentioning this, but the study they cite is for COVID-19 deaths between February and July 2020—the very beginning of the pandemic. There's no way to know if things have stayed the same more recently.

And then there are the numbers themselves. During the first half of 2020, a grand total of about 1,100 young people (age 20-54) died of COVID-19. I can't quite decipher the mortality rates in the paper, but given the white/Hispanic demographics of California this very roughly suggests about 700 Hispanic deaths and 100 white deaths if the mortality ratio is 8:1.

The total population of the young in California is about 14 million. Of that, about 5 million are white and 5 million are Hispanic. This gives us a final mortality rate from COVID-19 of 0.014% for Hispanics and 0.002% for whites. In other words, 1 in 50,000 for whites vs. 1 in 7,000 for Hispanics.

This is an example of what I was talking about yesterday. In one sense, a disparity of 8:1 is horrific, and of course we need to figure out what's going on. On the other hand, is this headline...

Young Latinos are dying of COVID at an alarming rate — the effects could be felt for generations

...really justified based on data that tells us the COVID-19 death rate of young Hispanics was 1 in 7,000 during the first half of 2020? That's not so clear.

Inflation remained high in November, clocking in at 6.8%. Here's what this looks like over a longer term:

The price level is now about 4% higher than it would be if inflation had remained on its pre-pandemic trendline.

Outside of food and fuel, the biggest gainers were airfare and used cars. The best performance was turned in by car insurance and hospital services, which were both down from last month.

Chris Hayes thinks that COVID-19 has overwhelmed us:

Something profoundly jarring about the scale of death of Covid and how it overwhelms everything else that are also horrible crises. I think we've basically (and somewhat understandably) turned our minds off to it, because it's too large for sustained contemplation.

— Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) December 9, 2021

At the risk of being irritatingly contrarian, I've long thought this was wrong. We focus a lot on huge numbers—50 million cases! 800,00 people dead!—but the truth is that these are relatively small numbers.

The total US death rate from COVID-19 is a little over 0.2%. But that's cumulative. During the first year of the pandemic, the annualized death rate was about 0.15%. Over the next nine months, with vaccines available, the death rate declined to 0.1%. If you're under 65 it goes down further to 0.035%. That's about one in 3,000. And if you're vaccinated it goes down to nearly zero.

Here's my point: I suspect that part of the public anxiety over COVID is due to the gigantic mismatch between rhetoric and reality. We are told loudly and often about how bad the COVID pandemic is. We have mask mandates, vaccination mandates, travel restrictions, business shutdowns, deep cleanings, remote schools, and constant reminders of how many people have died. And yet, the reality today is that most of us have only the tiniest sliver of a chance of dying from COVID-19.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that the deaths of the elderly don't matter. I'm not saying that COVID-19 is no big deal. I'm not ignoring long COVID. I'm just pointing out that for the vast majority of people, the risk of dying from COVID-19 is minuscule but they're being kept in a constant state of terror regardless.

I'm not sure what to conclude from this. I'm really not. I just wanted to point it out so that other people could chew it over.

This is just a crow common raven, and not even that great a picture of a raven. However, I had to lie on my back for several minutes to get it, and if I'm going to sacrifice myself like that then I'm damn well going to make sure everyone sees it.

And really, it's kind of a cool picture in its own way.