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.
I live in Michigan. He’s right.
1 out of 400 people die after walking into a grocery store, no one ever goes to that grocery store again. Hell, 10 people get salmonella, we throw away millions of dollars of food nad pass new food regulations. And think of all the other things we do just like that.
But, with Covid, it's like whatever man, I'll be fine.
Obviously, it's not that cut and dried, but it also is, which basically just means human being suck at calculating odds. And we especially suck, when elected leaders lie about the risks.
Obviously, we're all gonna die.
If only the ChiComs had intentionally leaked the bioweaponized fake Coronavirus hoax from a Jack in the Box instead of the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Uh, I think Country Joe sang, “Whoopee! We’re all gonna die!”
He homeschools (well, he and his pod) so likely has no opinion about closures (unless that's why he did it? Not clear.) The local hospitals likely have been impacted (Watervliet, Grand Rapids and Kazoo - I used to liver in Watervliet and work in Kazoo) but maybe he doesn't know anyone working there or needed elective surgery that's been denied? Or maybe he's a no-medicine type. What's most odd is his apparently lack of concern for the almost-a-million people who we've lost to this, and the 300k odd who have died since vax have been available? Pretty weird for a avowed/professional Catholic.
Walther is just a Bruenigga4Life.
WaPo guesses he's from St. Joseph County--not sure if they even have a hospital with an ICU.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Joseph_County,_Michigan#Cities
The ICU stats from the surrounding counties might tell a darker tale, and with the usual news desert of such small towns, the only deaths he's likely to know of are the ones at his church.
Sancta simplicitas
Well, when this started, a primary concern regarding the upcoming school year was the effect on teachers and...teachers really not wanting to go back to the classroom.
Teachers were older, more vulnerable, and what right did we have to sacrifice them as a class of individuals slated to walk up the steps to the high alter at Chichen Itza to have their hearts sliced out with an obsidian knife?
The teacher's union I believe was strongly opposed. If this was existential for parents...it was even more so for teachers...who rightfully didn't want to die.
I fear that you are practicing intellectual revisionism; you are applying what we know now, (maybe), to what we knew in June 2020. This is just wrong as a form of arguing a point...it is open cheating.
Let me make this a little more personal....how would you feel being in a classroom with 30 unmasked students, on a school campus with 400 teeming students coming from God knows where?
Lets see how brave you are in June 2020....or even now, go out an volunteer to teach on any local campus.
I didn't think so.
But thanks for sacrificing other older professional people...so kind of you.
Traveller
Very true.
There was some evidence from France, etc., that schools could be open...with masks and social distancing...but I'm not sure if that info was from areas being hit hard.
We might have been able to update our schooling policies, especially if local schools had air handling upgraded, during the last school year---but by that time we were going through the huge holiday spikes. Indeed, a number of schools that were open, closed because of covid cases and close contacts meant more than half the student body were home. People forgot that outbreaks in schools did happen. That didn't kill many kids, but it did foster community spread.
The mind plays funny tricks on people...
I don't know what the French are doing now, but during last Winter's surge, that required that all kids and staff wear masks, and they made sure that they staged the lunch times of the kids so they all didn't visit the cafeteria at the same time, and the had the kids sit away from each other in the cafeteria. If there was a COVID-19 case either among the students or the staff, everyone was sent home to quarantine for two weeks and they were schooled remotely. There were a bunch of schools that had outbreaks, but I heard the overall strategy kept the infections down. Not sure what they're doing this winter with a teenagers at least being vaccinated.
Excuse all the typos. I can't figure out how to go back and edit my response, though.
Don't worry: there is no edit function.
I was in France last month. Every restaurant, museum or other indoor public site required showing a vaccination card (otherwise known as a French passport). I know of only one restaurant in Olympia Wa that requires showing a vaccination card. France is taking Covid a lot more seriously than we are. I felt a lot safer there.
Sometimes I don't know what point Kevin is trying to make. As a country we are not over-reacting. Are some people being too cavalier? The exploding numbers make the answer to that question obvious. Being careful without being paranoid is the trick. Articles like the one in the Atlantic seems to promote being absurdly lax. Does Kevin really want to endorse that position. I hope not.
King County still requires restaurants to require the showing of a vaccination card. I was in Italy last month and all museums and restaurants with inside seating required proof of vaccination. Mask wearing was also quite good, better in the north than the south, but the south was still better than here. Had trouble getting into a car museum in Milano because of the French Porsche club in front of us. Seems the Italian scanners wouldn't read the green passes on the French cell phones. We crowded our way past them, showed our CDC cards and were good. I wanted to ask the French Porsche club if they knew that de Gaulle threw Dr. Porsche into prison for war crimes.
And how would you like to be a supermarket bagger interacting with hundreds of strangers a day? Or the myriad other professions that had to keep working despite the risks of getting infected? At the factory where I work, people didn't have the luxury of working from home, but many of them had to quit work to take care of their children who no longer could go to school. I think the teacher's union has been absolutely shameful in arguing for special status in the midst of the pandemic, and even more shameful in protesting the mandatory vaccinations that would allow them to return to school in relative safety.
This. I work for an electrical utility. While the accountants and other cubicle inhabitants have been working from home since spring 2020, lots of us have had to go into work as if there is no pandemic. Exactly how would everyone have reacted if we had said, "Sorry, we don't feel comfortable going to work, so none of you will have any electricity."
When you take a public sector job, which teaching is and electrical workers kind of are, you assume some responsibility for the public good, and not just your own well being. That didn't really come into play much prior to the pandemic, but it's always been true.
Ay, dios mio. Travellers is actually talking sense on the Internet.
I know, me making sense on the internet is....a remarkable moment isn't it?!@? (grin and laugh).
Be Good, Traveller
Perhaps he got a bit of horse sense knocked in to him 😉
Yep. Exactly that. One of my son's teachers at the time was in her 60s.
And very soon after teachers and staff could be be fully vaccinated the schools reopened in person, still with the kids entirely unvaccinated.
This arrogance is why Democrats are in such trouble with the working class.
Try to explain to a plumber, policeman, a person working in a grocery store, a person working in a slaughterhouse why it's OK for them to be sacrificed because their jobs were essential but not OK for teachers to be sacrificed because educating children of the working class isn't essential, and the rich can set up learning pods or take time off to home school their kids.
If the political class had had to home school their own kids while also going into work for full work days during the pandemic I bet those schools would not have closed for more than 5 days.
Police officers are among some of the most vaxxx resistant people.
Let's let them explain why they want to sacrifice themselves to Baphomet... I mean, MAGAmet.
Well said Traveller. The evidence has certainly shown learning loss from remote teaching and burden on parents. But that is only one side of the equation. As you note, there is still the danger to teachers, especially elderly teachers. And the evidence has now shown that children can be vectors and spread even if they don't suffer personally. So nothing about recent evidence has shown that there is no risk or even minimal risk to teachers.
One additional thing to consider. It's very hard to generalize situations. That's the point of the article. We live in Florida and where my wife teaches is a 100-year-old building with little ventilation. Plus there is a culture of noncompliance and forced exposure here. You can't even count on consistent enforcement of mass requirements against students or even staff.
We were fortunate that my wife could take a leave of absence but not everyone is so fortunate. The risk is real. To simply hand wave and say that subsequently developed evidence shows that concerns about school closures were unmerited requires completely dismissing this concern.
Not saying that risk to elderly teachers should wholly predominate the analysis, but it's usually not even considered, as evidenced here.
On a larger note, I don't how anyone can say that concerns over Covid generally are unmerited and the meta level. We have lost 800,000 people, and that may be at least a limited undercount. If anything, the original concerns have been completely validated if not understated.
It's just become a culture war, unfortunately.
In Birmingham AL I can say it's mostly right as well as far as people just living their lives. (Honestly for the vaccinated I don't think that is too wrong. But the numbers suggest many are unvaccinated.)
People are tired of having to deal with Covid. That's why the Republicans are so anti-vaccine and anti-mask. As long as infections rates are high, Democrats will try to keep mandates in place to keep everyone safe, which is frustrating for everyone...but the Democrats get the blame for trying to deal with the virus, not the Republicans for, well, actively trying to prolong the pandemic?
Anti vaccine dialectics isn't working. Rural vaccination has surged recently. Pay attention. Masks were overblown. Washing hands, socially distancing from large crowds is the key.
Most of the initial restrictions were over blown and in the long run with this kind of contagious rate, just can kicking.
*Murc's.
https://www.muhealth.org/our-stories/masks-play-key-role-slowing-spread-covid-19 "Masks Play Key Role in Slowing Spread of COVID-19"
Pretty easily dismissed as a lie or woefully incorrect at best.
Marc's Law.
One thing to keep an eye one...Covid can damage the lungs. That could be making colds and flues worse. This a bit different than the "long covid", but some symptoms of long covid could be due to lung damage. I'm guessing asymptomatic people or those with mild cases don't have to worry much. But that is something that needs to be followed up on.
Before Covid, pandemic models strongly said "close the schools." So that, combined with the teachers' concerns, makes it understandable.
But Kevin's inability to give up the Sweden model - when they suck compared to fellow Scandinavian countries (both in terms of death and economic results) is beneath him.
A distinction needs to be made between closing schools in the spring of 2020, when we had no data to work with, and keeping them closed in the fall of 2020, once we did have some. The former was entirely justified. The latter wasn't.
I don't think the evidence from fall of 2020 was particularly strong and why would you reopen schools then with a vaccine just around the corner?
I returned to Asia a year ago, so my knowledge of the specifics about what Americans are doing/feeling is limited to what I read, and to what friends and family tell me. But I think the reason for the mixed signals about how much people "care about" covid is that there's a dichotomy for many between:
A) "Concern" as in "personal fear of the disease known as covid19" and
B) "Concern" as in "worried about the various effects of the pandemic on their jobs, the economy, social stability, politics, etc (in other words, when is the damn pandemic going to end, and when are things going to get back to normal?)."
I suspect that, for the vast majority of Americans, A is outweighed by B. After all, when it comes to the first category, virtually everyone is either fully vaccinated (with boosters available) or clueless.
Sweden is no great shakes, but they also aren't looking terrible.
Sure. Sweden's kinda "meh." But what did they accomplish with their laissez-faire approach in the early-going? I guess Swedes were able to live more normally for a few additional months in the first part of 2020. A marginally more pleasant spring of 2020 than other Nordic people were experiencing isn't nothing, I guess.
But I dunno, it doesn't seem like this was a very big gain for what, after all, is still a lot of extra dead Swedes compared to what would be the case if they had followed Norwegian or Danish policies.
As of today, Sweden's cumulative death rate is roughly seven times that of Norway, six times that of Finland. Those are the neighboring Nordic countries to which Sweden's outcome can be most directly compared.
Right. And about three times that of Denmark.
For the record, cumulative deaths per million population to date, April 2020 on:
Sweden: 1,4657
Norway: 211 / Finland: 257 / Denmark: 517
U.K.: 2,183 / U.S': 2,395
Couple thoughts on this.
First, it's a truism that, in our culture, NO ONE ever gets praise or credit for preventing bad things that never happen. Note the statement ". . . most of us have only the tiniest sliver of a chance of dying from COVID-19." That would not be true if EVERYONE behaved in the way Walther's rural neighbors apparently do. The death toll from the virus would be 10X more. So those who have complied with the safety measures (as most do in my suburban Chicago-area region) have reduced the spread of the virus and created conditions where knuckleheads in rural Michigan (or rural anywhere) don't get sick and either die or spend the rest of their lives partially disabled. You're welcome, knuckleheads.
Kevin may be right about school closures, but how could the experts have known? This was completely unexplored territory. I will fault the experts for not being more candid about how limited their ability was to assess the risks and how uncertain everything was. Medical experts have an unfortunate habit of always striving to appear "in control" even when they're not, and it sometimes has the unfortunate effect of eroding trust when they turn out to be off target.
And finally, a lot has to do with the particular American (as in "emotionally stunted") culture of "I'll be damned if I let anyone tell me what to do." We will eventually get to 1 million COVID-19 fatalities; 75% will be among the elderly; that leaves ~250,000 deaths that were NOT elderly. Future historians will not know whether to laugh or cry at our ineptness combined with indifference.
Rural??? Inner city is the worst. Blacks simply don't care.
I must have missed Kevin's post where he comes to the absurd conclusion that masks only have a modest effect on preventing contagion. There were several studies done of the original Wuhan variant that estimated the number virions (virus particles) that were required to infect a cell. One study estimated it that a single virion landing on one's mucus membranes would have a 1/1500 chance of successfully infecting a cell, and another study put it lower at a 1/3000 chance (I think that study used ferrets, so it might not be applicable to humans). Be that as it may, reducing the number of saliva aerosol particles carrying the SARS-CoV-2 virions one inhales reduces the chances of getting infected.
A KF94 mask will filter out 94% of those virion-infested aerosols. So if we use the1 in 1500 number, 1/94*1500/=1/141,000. So a KF94 mask, if properly fitted will reduce your chances of being infected to approx 140,000 to 1 every time you come with in the breathing space of COVID-19 carrier. Of course, if you're a service worker who encounters dozens of unmasked people on daily basis, you odds of catching SARS-CoV-2 are significantly higher than that. But likewise, if everyone you encounter is masked with KF94, KF95, or N95 equivalent mask, your odds of catching SARS-CoV-2 are still infinitely lower than when dealing with the unmasked.
Now, not all masks are fitted correctly. Not all masks have that high filtration capacity. But if you've got a well-fitted mask that filters out 94 to 95 percent of the aerosol particles you're probably not going to catch COVID-19. But again your odds go up with the greater number of people you encounter, and with the density of aerosols as you get closer to them.
We can assume that Delta is more contagious than the original Wuhan Variant. If it's twice as contagious maybe it will take only 750 virions to successfully infect a person. I suspect it's not quite as contagious as some of the models claim. OTOH, Omicron right now (by the numbers) seems to be 2.8x as transmissible as Delta. So masking will be getting overall less effective if and when Om takes off in the US.
But your odds of not being infected will still be better if you and anyone you meet are both masked. If you're both masked the odds of a virion getting through the other persons mask and then getting through your mask are multiplied to get the probability. When multiplying fractions, the numbers get smaller...
https://www.kxan.com/news/coronavirus/do-face-masks-work-here-are-49-scientific-studies-that-explain-why-they-do/
Masks have a modest impact. Deal with it. Your 94's are not common in the public.
"Multi-layer cloth masks block release of exhaled respiratory particles into the environment,3-6 along with any microorganisms associated with these particles.7, 8 Cloth masks not only effectively block most large droplets (i.e., 20-30 microns and larger),9 but they can also block the exhalation of fine droplets and particles (also often referred to as aerosols) smaller than 10 microns3, 5 which increase in number with the volume of speech10-12 and specific types of phonation.13 Multi-layer cloth masks can both block 50-70% of these fine droplets and particles3, 14 and limit the forward spread of those that are not captured.5, 6, 15, 16 Upwards of 80% blockage has been achieved in human experiments,4 with cloth masks in some studies performing on par with surgical masks as barriers for source control.3, 9, 14, 17"
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/science-briefs/masking-science-sars-cov2.html#anchor_1619456988446
Why do you even do this buddy?
It's a semi-literate racist troll. It leaves its droppings to get attention. Please don't feed the troll.
Also, alcoholic.
Given that once one is infected, it is a race between the virus and your immune system response, it is reasonable that reducing the initial virial load might well increase your odds of avoiding serious symptoms.
qx-
The problem with that analysis is that there are no "constants" with this disease.
We are now finding out that men shed the virus differently than women. Kids shed virions differently than adults
And the people who are exposed? They are either obese, with high blood pressure or they have diseases that affect their immune systems, or take meds for other maladies that impair their immune system. Diabetes, psoriasis, rheumatoid arthritis, HIV, irritable bowel syndrome etc all affect the person exposed. The number of people with those types of diseases is staggering. There are far too many variables
I read yesterday that COVID has caused 1 out of 100 senior citizens to die. Since when is it "normal" NOT to react to 500,000 excess deaths in this age group?
Or, are the republicans afraid that too much discussion will lead us to the conclusion that our private health care system here in the US has failed us and the alternatives are what they fear?
Masks are a minor inconvenience that save lives by reducing the rates of hospitalization and death by several percentage points. Multiple studies have confirmed this. I mean - what's the big deal about putting on a face mask for the twenty minutes you spend inside a supermarket?
Ask yourself: If wearing a face mask every time you went shopping for a year would save ONE human life, would that be worth it to you?
Its not whether the general population is "tired" of COVID.
It's whether big business is "tired" of it.
Could a meat packing plant with 3000 employees standing elbow to elbow be able to absorb the loss of a shut down from everyone getting sick over say a two week period? I don't think we could indemnify them against a lawsuit - which is the crux of the problem.
It's a tough issue but there are several things at play here
DELTA is attacking those UNDER 65 more than over 65 so it's attacking working aged men and women. If this disease were transmitted sexually it would be different - you would KNOW you had it and knowingly spread it through sex.
But in this case you can spread it w/o even knowing you had it. You could spread it just by talking loudly or sneezing in the "break room" and YOU would have no way of knowing which of your co-workers is protected by vaccines OR is exempted from getting the vaccine.
But for a company to make the decision to throw caution to the wind means they accept the liability that comes with it. THIS is why cruise lines shut down, in spite of what Ron DeathSentence wanted. He didn't have the power to indemnify them against lawsuits arising from someone getting the disease onboard - so they took it upon themselves to issue vaccine mandates for passengers. Flying for business reasons is another reason for mandates of either vaccines or masks (or both).
THIS is why I get so upset with Americans that assault flight attendents or take their frustration out on hostesses or bartenders who are tasked with being the guard to make sure the patrons are as safe as can be. It's NOT political - it's about risk to the business.
And of course now we have this wrinkle in the whole thing too:
https://www.news10.com/news/coronavirus/2-dose-vaccines-dont-induce-enough-antibodies-against-omicron-research-shows/
{snip}
The research, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, documented a “substantial fall” in the number of neutralizing antibodies, among participants who received two doses of the AstraZeneca or Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines.
The results do not provide evidence that the omicron strain causes more severe disease, hospitalizations or deaths in vaccinated individuals. But it does indicate that the variant could lead to more cases among those vaccinated with two doses.
{snip}
Those 2 vaccines were the first to market and are widely used across the globe.
And Omicron is spreading FASTER than the pharma companies can produce a variant specific modification to the formula.
We have far too many auto-immune diseases in this country never mind the general population is obese and has other comorbidities.
Omicron, although the weakest of the waves (so far) - is NOT "the one".
Dude, Omicron is only 25% lethal compared to previous versions. Your a idiot. Omicron is the covid death knell as a pandemic.
Considering cases are down 50% yry. Hospitalization 55%. What do people expect????? Last winter was bad. Very very bad. Not as much this winter no matter how much the media tries.
I was massaged into going to a Christmas play yesterday. About 33-50% had masks. The place offered heavy cleaning materials. Nobody was particularly close despite being normal capacity.
KD:
I’d like to see the data and model that backs up this assertion.
There is a total-risk argument in favor of closing schools: we knew from the very beginning that any Covid vaccine would first be tested with adults, and therefore that children would be at elevated risk over a longer period of time than adults. Before there was enough data on relative severity, one would be prudent to assume that the disease was not less lethal in children than in young adults, so limiting children’s daily contacts more wasn’t unreasonable.
I have become a bit addicted to reading the Herman Cain subreddit, where people receive the "Herman Cain Award” (who famously tweeted the day after he died that the risks from Covid were highly exaggerated) for shit posting about Covid, then getting infected and dying. It's like watching an ever-repeating train wreck. One unscientific observation from all this: this is no Covid in many rural areas till there is. Then it often spreads catastrophically through family units. It's all well and good to talk about a fatality rate under 1%, but that just means that for any given sample of one the odds are 1% the death rate will be 100%. Over 65 or other pre-existing condition? The odds are more like 10% chance the death rate will be 100% in any given sample of one.
https://www.sorryantivaxxer.com/
+1 dead Mainer perennial candidate in a hot tub
Well, first of all I resent it that some guy living in rural Michigan who is “editor of The Lamp, a Catholic literary journal, and a contributing editor at the American Conservative” counts as “normal people” and presumably I don’t because I live in the San Francisco Bay Area. Please let me know what it is about rural life that automatically assigns you as being “normal”. Or does “normal” just mean white Christian Republican who doesn’t live in the city?
I read the Atlantic article earlier today and my thought was “Well, I guess that explains Michigan’s high death rate. Note that if California had Michigan’s death rate an additional 32,000 people here would be dead. But I guess that’s acceptable in Kevin’s world.
In my county it would translate to an additional 1,400 deaths. I guess that’s nothing compared to the 100 or so deaths of “normal” people in rural Kentucky.
At the Atlantic, normal people are those of whom Conor Friedersdorf is pretty sure won't try to rape him with a baguette.
To think, in 1850, the Atlantic started as an abolitionist mouthpiece. Today, Goldberg, Flanagan, Friedersdorf, Green, et. al., would be the pro-slavery expansion vessel.
A lot of getting people to care about Covid is getting people to care about other people, not a high priority right now. For instance, the fight over schools: The anti-vax/maskers are demanding something they already have; the right to decide if their kids wear masks. What they really want is to allow their unprotected kid to infect a bunch of other kids/families who did nothing to deserve being put into danger. They want to force everyone else to accept that there is no pandemic. Same thing with the Aaron Rodgers types.
Lol, Rodgers never said their was no pandemic. That died last winter. A waste of a post that represents dialectical nonsense.
To answer your initial question, yes normal people are concerned about Covid. The data shows that a lot of Republicans aren't normal. Any surprises there? They're not alone, but there is a dedicated segment of stubborn individualists among Republicans who see no point in addressing community concerns. Just because a conservative from Bumfuck Michigan says no one cares in his community, well, that's not surprising. But I'd like to revisit his community's experience sometime in February and see just how well things are going.
Dialectical nonsense. Just "some" Republicans??? How about many educated Democratic naturopath elites???? Just because they are quiet means little. Maybe the elite should have had the Party's switch roles. Watching Tucker Faglson whine about Democratic naturopath elites trying to kill old white people would have been hilarious.
If Walther were just describing the lack of concern about Covid in non-urban areas, it would be one thing. But he is all but advocating that that is the correct position to take. He describes common-sense precautions as "small-minded and puritanical," and sees masks as nothing more than "symbols" for wearers to signal they are "apart from the reactionary banality of life in flyover country." He brought up the word, and it's a good one to describe his article. It's a reactionary piece of garbage. The Atlantic did a lot of good reporting earlier in the pandemic. Apparently, they are tired of the whole narrative of mass death sweeping the land, be careful out there. Now it's time to pretend the whole thing is over, no need to worry your pretty heads about it anymore.
As I read it, Walther is describing a reckless and out-of-control culture that can't be bothered for one moment to consider the consequence of their actions. They are drunks at the bar ordering the next round of shots as last call approaches. One more for the road! Truth is, most of them are going to make it home all right. The odds aren't that bad. And the ones who won't make it safely? Not their problem.
Walther and the people he describes have been reckless all along. That's not Kevin's problem. He, like editors at the Atlantic, were far more concerned about public health early on. Now, he uses his ample cognitive talents to rationalize mass death as no big deal. It's not a pretty sight.
Kevin, at the link, was not just saying that many people are not observing safety protocols. He was saying "not many people" are dying of Covid anymore.
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.
Currently, deaths average about 1200 per day. A 9/11 every 2.5 days. But not so bad in percentage terms! Imagine the news on that fateful Sept. 11. "The nation was attacked by terrorists today, who killed 1 of every 100,000 Americans. Not so many, when you think about it. In other news...."
Of course, that's different. But the desire to minimize a death toll of 800,000 in our country, millions elsewhere, and with no end in sight, is breathtakingly callous (his disclaimers aside).
Kevin wasn't always so cavalier. In May 2020, when the Trump admin had released projections of high rates of deaths, this was Kevin then:
https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2020/05/cdc-projects-half-a-million-deaths-from-covid-19/
We are so fucked:
...
HALF A MILLION DEATHS.>/b>
I suppose it’s possible that the CDC is completely off base. But . . . probably not.
HALF A MILLION DEATHS.
Words are failing me. Do they really believe this? ...
ARE THEY SERIOUSLY KEEPING IT A SECRET THAT THEY EXPECT HALF A MILLION DEATHS FROM COVID-19?
Recapping, Kevin's commentary on the pandemic went from a projection of 500,000 deaths being "We are so fucked" to the reality of 800,000+ deaths and an ongoing rate of 1200 per day being "not many people."
It's a fascinating phenomenon and I'm not sure how to explain it. Survivor bias? Or somehow we get used to a really large number and it doesn't bother us like it did in the beginning? What if the number doubles or triples from here? When do we get to say, Hey, that's a lot of people who died?
It's below 1200 deaths. Looks 1050. Probably down to 300 by April.
I remember two Aprils ago it was supposed to just disappear, like a miracle.
Subjects of free market ideology care more about producing surpluses to accrue to the rich than about the people who must toil to earn these revenues.
You need to be really super careful with that graph and the conclusions you are drawing from it. Sweden has a lower household size than the U.S., which should lower R0. Sweden has low smoking. Sweden is slightly older, and might be more obese.
But here in San Mateo County, you could also pretty much say that we are living our lives as if Covid were over. Except for the fact that we wear masks in public, and get tested 3 days before we get on a plane, we pretty much live our lives as we did two years ago. I've been out to the movies; I've been on a cruise; I go out to restaurants; my wife still goes shopping.
I find it super weird when out of the Bay Area. So many unmasked people. And like you I don’t find wearing a mask and being vaccinated all that cumbersome. Our county’s deaths per million from covid would put us below every state except Vermont and Hawaii. I’m pretty happy with that.
> 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.
Yeah, "Get Vaccinated" is a cumbersome countermeasure. Sheez!
I guess the real problem is that there isn't a solution of violence. I mean you can't shoot it, drone it, punch it. As soon as professional sports returned to play regular seasons is the moment the pandemic ended.
[sigh]
Professional sports saw a way to get back to making money. At no cost to them. Get your government vaccine and come to the games !!!! It's one of our biggest businesses. The "tout" things like public private partnerships to build humongous stadiums only to find a myriad of ways to reduce their tax footprint to the very entities that they partnered with !!! And we gladly "take it" without question because ----------sports..
Yes, the only thing missing is bread...
How can you run an empire just on circuses?
Haha... Here in Tenn., COVID NEVER existed.
1 in 100 over 65 have died and no one cares....amazing...
The shortsightedness of Nashvillain KKKlay Travis, not to realize that the more seniors who die, the fewer to patronize his advertisers on the KKKlay n' Bumblefuck Show.
Speaking as someone who lives in a reddish area, with family in the country, this is absolutely true. It's almost amazing to me the difference you see between e.g. NYC and in the rural midwest or south. In small towns, everyone packs into church and the local diner without a mask in sight, goes to their kids' basketball games, lives "normally." To the extent they deal with restrictions it's enforced stuff from e.g. the school district -- I hear lots of complaining about kids forced to quarantine. In the city, many people are still worried about play dates or meeting up, travelling, checking vax status, etc.
I don't think it's that no one in the country is worried, it's that they're fewer and mostly older folks. The social tone and norms get set by people who aren't worried.
My life is largely back to how it was pre-pandemic.
Exceptions: I always wear a mask in an indoor public place (not a big deal if your identity isn't tied up in owning the libs); I eat out much less frequently; I probably go into indoor public places about half as frequently as before because of thinking "do I really need to do this right now?"
But that's almost entirely due to having two vaccine shots and a booster last Friday. And no kids to worry about.
For the unvaxxed going around being less cautious than me ... they're idiots.
Oh God, why do I keep doing this…
Yes, Sweden failed its elderly and frail. No, it wasn’t necessarily the strategy itself that was the problem.
The situation in the different Nordic countries at the initial outbreak of covid-19 were very different. The crucial first week of March had about one million Swedes on holiday, most in the Alps. This is almost 10% of the Swedish population, and a very large majority of these were Stockholmers, because this particular week was a winter school holiday in Stockholm (and in all of Belgium, apparently. See a pattern?). Other parts of Sweden had their corresponding holiday another week, and the same goes for major cities in the other Nordic countries. This was a critical, major piece of extremely bad luck, because it ended up being a huge seeding for the outbreak in Sweden. No realistic action taken by the authorities could have done much in this situation. Think about it, it would mean having 10% of your population isolated at home for two weeks (and note that since most of these were from the Stockholm area, the proportion of the local population not going to work, including hospitals etc, would be much more than 10%), and this on speculation because the extent of the situation was not yet known at the time. Hospitals, care homes, schools and so forth would not have been able to cope. Closing the borders would have done no good since the people taking the disease from abroad were already within the borders.
So, there were probably not much that could have been done strategy-wise to stop the initial outbreak, which set the stage for the whole disaster. BUT what could, and definitely should, have been done, was to act on the massive issues in the Swedish care home system, and home care for the elderly. It was probably too late to make a huge difference by then, the problems were too big, but to me it seems nobody really tried. THIS was a major failure! Even here there are some factors that also need to be taken into account, like the fact that the flu season the winter before had been unusually mild in Sweden, leaving unusually many very frail elderly that otherwise probably would have died because of the flu the year before. But still. Major failure. In general, Swedes were very careful, keeping social distance etc, in particular the elderly who practically isolated themselves at home. The problem was protecting those that needed daily care.
I find it so frustrating that people who should be able to think logically somehow can’t take this in: If Sweden failed and e.g. Norway succeeded because Norway had stricter formal countermeasures than Sweden, then how come so many other countries that did the same as Norway fared worse than Sweden? Is it that there is something special about the Nordics that says that in these particular countries, lockdown is the solution, but not elsewhere? It should be obvious to any analytical person that this is so much more complex than that.
Finally, Kevin mentions stricter restrictions in Sweden lately. The main difference is that for public events and gatherings of more than 100, organizers can choose between only allowing participants with a vaccination certificate or taking precautions such as distance between groups etc. This is good, but will not have had an impact yet since it has only been in effect for about a week. Most think that the main reason Sweden for the moment is doing so much better than our neighbors and the rest of Europe is that so many have natural immunity, resulting from the huge initial outbreak (see above). At that time testing was sparse to say the least, so the vast majority went under the radar. But nobody believes that this will save us in the long run, we hunker down and expect the worse (for this season) is yet to come.
You mean Danes, Finns and Norwegians don't vacation? Color me super-duper maximally skeptical your "explanation" is what accounts for Sweden's outlier-ness among the Nordic states.
That is not what I wrote. Read again, please.
Many of the northern countries (at least) in Europe have a special school holiday week intended for outdoors winter vacationing. Usually this week is the same for each area each year (at least in Sweden), but differs between different areas/cities. In the Stockholm area, it is always week 9, other parts of the country have theirs on other, surrounding weeks. It so happened that other big areas/cities in the Nordic countries all had other weeks for their winter holiday.
That said, it is apparently also a fact that Swedes do travel internationally to a larger extent than our neighbors for some reason, but in this case the issue is what particular week lots of people were in the high risk areas.
This, together with our horribly failed elder care system (possibly among other things), makes us outliers. The Norwegian elder care is far, far better than ours, for example.
Whatever, dude:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0168851021002220
Yes, and…? Interesting paper, thank you for that, but where do you see anything contradictory to what I wrote? This paper gives an in-depths analysis of various aspects of the Nordic responses, and the different political and governmental regulations they had to operate within.
Some of what is mentioned I could of course comment on a bit further, like the fact that our health care system is divided into 21 autonomous regions. I think this is bad for us, even without a pandemic, but especially in such a crisis, and I suspect this has been detrimental to some degree.
But discussions on things like this won’t contribute much to the understanding of the explosion of cases early on in Sweden, neither does this paper claim to do so.
I don’t understand the total unwillingness to take in information from locals. It’s not like I’m saying Sweden didn’t fail, of course we did, just not in exactly the way you want us to have failed. There were several factors making our situation particularly hard, including initial seeding, a very large immigrant population, and a lousy elder care system. The latter is nothing other than deeply shameful.
I don't think it's just rural areas. I live in Tampa and I honestly can't think of a single way that covid is currently impacting daily life other than occasionally seeing people wearing masks and staff shortages at restaurants. Honestly, nothing is different then it was pre-covid. Our schools have been open full time in person since August of 2020. It's been well over a year since most people here have had daily life influenced by the pandemic.
Of curse that's with the exception of people that have actually had covid. We know at least 150 people (including many of our kids' friends and teammates) that have had it. Fortunately only one of them was seriously sick (several days in ICU) but has since made a full recovery.
It's amazing to me how many people, mostly very liberal types, seem to find it a badge of honor to be as panicked about COVID as they possibly can be, to be constantly in state of finger wagging and "I told you so" about all the people not as panicked as they are.
Since May (when I was fully vaxed) I've been living my life pretty much as normal. I'm in a band and we've been playing and singing together in our small practice space just about every week. I've been traveling. Going to restaurants. Going to see bands at bars. I went to a pro football game. 100% normal living. I have 0 personal fear of COVID. If I get it I might get a little bit sick. There's an outside chance I could get very sick but the risk is small--the sort of risk I routinely faced in the past without freaking out about it. And I could give 2 f**ks if the people who refuse to get vaxed continue to get very sick and die. I really could.
And by the way nearly all of my very liberal friends and family are living life the same as I am. We are vaxed, but otherwise we are over it. I think this describes nearly the entire country.
The ultra-liberal scolds need to get over it too.
100% agree. And that is the same attitude as pretty much everyone I know. Maybe I'm just not traveling to the right places where there are these hordes of people living in fear.
There's also an outside chance you could get and infect a loved one who then dies. I'm sure you'll get over it.
Better then an outside chance I could die in a car accident driving to work. Do you suggest we just live as hermits? And all my loved ones are vaccinated, as am I. So very little chance any of us are going to die of covid. If you're not going to love your life when you're fully vaccinated, what is it going to take?
*live your life
The predestination theology deeply embedded in the psyche of America's majority of Christians reveals itself as capitulation to the need of individuals to labor for wages despite an epidemic. The fatalism of the political economy and religious doctrine leaves the subjects of American rugged individualism no choice but to carry on as if nothing matters but to earn a living and pay the rent.