Tag: Covid-19

Why Covid-19 is always one step ahead of the US response

Posted on by Lone Candle

“The Biden administration’s response to the omicron variant is belatedly kicking into gear. The White House announced Wednesday that it would soon ship 400 million N95 masks to US pharmacies and community health centers to be given away. Americans can submit their bills for at-home tests to their health insurer for reimbursement, and on Tuesday, a new federal website launched that lets people order a few free at-home coronavirus tests.

Free tests and free masks are finally here — after some public health experts have been calling for them since omicron was first detected around Thanksgiving or even earlier. But the tests and masks might not arrive in Americans’ hands until the end of the month.

“By the time the masks and tests get there, the surge will probably be over,” Monica Gandhi, an infectious diseases doctor at the University of California San Francisco, told me. It’s possible — but far from certain — that the omicron wave has already peaked. The average number of daily cases has dropped by 50,000 in the last week, a 6 percent decline.”

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“Experts point to three main factors in the US government’s slow response to omicron: an over-reliance on vaccines, a failure to develop contingency plans, and the fracturing of the expert consensus on what the appropriate public health interventions would be.”

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“There are limits on what the federal government can do under our federalist system of government. Mask mandates and social distancing restrictions are largely the purviews of state and local authorities. The Biden administration did attempt to take sweeping actions, such as a vaccine mandate for large employers, that got tied up in the courts.”

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“Public health experts were never a monolith. But early in the pandemic, there was a fairly clear consensus about what to do about Covid-19: Close some businesses, ban most large gatherings, mandate masks, and develop a vaccine. A New York Times survey of hundreds of epidemiologists found in the summer of 2020 that more than half were in agreement about the timeline for resuming many activities that had been stopped because of Covid-19, such as vacationing within driving distance or eating out at a restaurant.

But as the pandemic has dragged on, expert opinions diverged. In spring 2021, the Times ran another survey of epidemiologists, asking them how long people would need to wear masks indoors, the answers varied wildly; 20 percent said half a year or less, while another 26 percent said people would wear masks indefinitely, at least in certain situations. As the Biden administration debated booster shots this summer and fall, some experts were full-throated supporters of giving everybody an additional dose, while other prominent experts argued boosters made sense only for certain people.”

The shape of the omicron wave is becoming clearer

Posted on by Lone Candle

“The omicron variant has helped drive the United States into uncharted territory for the pandemic. The country was reporting an average of more than 400,000 new Covid-19 cases every day as of January 3, easily eclipsing last winter’s record of 250,000. And infections are still spiking, with the number of newly reported cases quadrupling since the beginning of December.
There is still a lot of uncertainty with the omicron variant: We’re still learning exactly how transmissible it is, how likely it is to cause severe disease and for whom. But we know more now than we did when it first began spreading in the US.

All the early indications were that omicron was even more transmissible than its predecessors, at least in part because of its ability to partially evade preexisting immunity, and that has proven to be true. While earlier CDC estimates that the variant took over in the US in mid-December turned out to be overstated, omicron now appears to have surpassed the previously dominant delta variant in its share of new US cases.

With cases rising, so is the number of patients in the hospital with Covid-19. But, at least so far, hospitalizations are not rising as rapidly as infections, lending credence to the theory that omicron leads to less severe disease, particularly for vaccinated people. Deaths have barely budged over the last month, with about 1,250 new deaths being reported every day as of January 3, essentially unchanged from the 1,125 daily average on December 3. While there is always a time lag between new reported cases and the data showing more serious illness, the evidence, including biological research findings, that omicron poses less of a threat to each individual patient is only growing.”

America doesn’t have enough teachers to keep schools open

Posted on by Lone Candle

“Studies in the US and around the world have found that student learning suffered when classes were remote, and many teachers were no fan of the system either, with educators ranking the challenges of virtual instruction among their top pandemic stressors in one recent study. At the same time, some fear that in-person school during omicron may simply become untenable. Sheikh’s school has one nurse for 2,500 students, making it nearly impossible to do any real contact tracing. “There’s no way to contain these Covid cases,” she said.”

Congress is on the brink of an immense health policy failure

Posted on by Lone Candle

“The coronavirus pandemic has fully exposed the flaws in the US health care system and deepened many of its disparities. Yet there is a serious possibility, now that Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) has rendered the current version of the Build Back Better Act dead, that the current Congress will not pass any long-term provisions to cover more people, make health care more affordable, or better prepare the nation for the next pandemic.

Though they have not attracted as much attention as other parts of the legislation, Democrats had written a wide-ranging health care section in Build Back Better. They were planning to patch up holes in the Affordable Care Act, extending assistance to middle-class families as well as people in poverty; to reduce drug costs for millions of Americans; and to make investments in the country’s health care infrastructure, with the goal of better preparing the US for the inevitable next pandemic.”

Against Faucism

Posted on by Lone Candle

“Last week, the CEOs of American Airlines and Southwest Airlines told Congress that they do not think mask requirements make much sense on airplanes, where the air filtration systems are superior to what is typically found in an intensive care unit.
“I think the case is very strong that masks don’t add much, if anything, in the air cabin environment,” said Gary Kelly, CEO of Southwest. “It is very safe and very high quality compared to any other indoor setting.”

Unwilling to let anyone undermine the case for keeping a government mandate in place, White House coronavirus advisor Anthony Fauci threw cold water on the idea.

“You have to be wearing a mask on a plane,” he said bluntly on television Sunday.

When ABC News’ Jon Karl asked Fauci specifically if he thought we would ever reach the point where we did not need to wear masks on planes, he responded: “I don’t think so. I think when you’re dealing with a closed space, even though the filtration is good, that you want to go that extra step when you have people—you know, you get a flight from Washington to San Francisco, it’s well over a five-hour flight. Even though you have a good filtration system, I still believe that masks are a prudent thing to do, and we should be doing it.”

This is Faucism distilled down to its very essence. For the government health bureaucrats who have given themselves sole authority over vast sectors of American life—from travel to education to entertainment to housing—it doesn’t matter what the CEOs of these companies think. It doesn’t matter what their customers want. It doesn’t matter if maskless air travel is, for the most part, quite safe (especially for the vaccinated). It doesn’t matter if the mask mandate makes air travel impossible for families with young children. All that matters is the calculus of the most risk-averse people: unelected public health experts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Like Fauci, NIH Director Frances Collins said this past weekend that air passengers should be masked—and should think twice about large gatherings, and even about going anywhere at all.”