“Throughout the pandemic, the median view of good housing policy—supported by landlord associations, tenant advocates, and policy wonks of all ideological stripes—has been to have the federal government fund rent relief. That way, the providers of rental housing can pay their bills, and financially pressed renters aren’t forced onto the streets or into more crowded living situations.
Despite these funds being appropriated for rent relief programs, actually getting money to people continues to be a major challenge.”
“the science on masks is clear: They work. Even experts I spoke with who think harsh lockdowns may have been counterproductive say indoor mask mandates were clearly effective.
“Indoor masking guidance was proven to be effective,” Amesh Adalja, senior scholar at the John Hopkins Center for Health Security, told me. “When you look at it all, I think that is probably going to be the one that shows the most effect. … Most things can be done safely if people socially distance and wear a mask indoors in an unvaccinated setting.”
The available research supports that conclusion. In a study published in March 2021, CDC researchers examined case and death rates at the county level after mask mandates were put into place and found the mandates were associated with slower transmission.”
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“An earlier study, published in June 2020 in Health Affairs, had reached the same conclusion. Its authors estimated that mask mandates had averted some 200,000 Covid-19 cases by mid-May; at the time, the US had counted less than 2 million cases, indicating that the mask mandates had a meaningful effect in slowing the virus down early in the pandemic.
Some commentators have questioned why dire warnings about what would happen when Texas lifted its mask mandate for good in March 2021 never materialized. But the mandate’s rollback took place in a very different context from the spring of 2020.
For one, many more people now have protection from the virus, between vaccinations and prior infections. More widespread immunity was already an obstacle for the virus.
But on top of that, because the pandemic has become so politicized, people have already sorted themselves into their different camps, experts indicated — and so a state mandate might not have changed behavior. By now, you are already either a mask-wearer or you’re not. A government mandate probably isn’t going to affect someone’s behavior in June 2021 as much as it would have a year ago, especially after enforcement has been nonexistent.”
“Brazil’s coronavirus situation is dire, but it’s not surprising given that Bolsonaro downplayed the pandemic from the beginning.
He called it the “little flu.” He shrugged at the country’s mounting death toll by saying “we’ll all die one day.” He undermined governors’ attempts to enforce social distancing and other measures, insisting economies reopen. He used a homophobic slur to refer to those who wore masks. He has continued to tout the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine and other unproven drugs as coronavirus cures.
When it comes to Covid-19 vaccinations, Bolsonaro has sowed misinformation and doubt. In December, he said of possible side effects on the Pfizer vaccine, “If you turn into a crocodile, it’s your problem.” He strongly criticized Chinese-made vaccines, including bashing his own government’s deal to acquire the CoronaVac vaccine. “The Brazilian people WON’T BE ANYONE’S GUINEA PIG,” he wrote on social media last year. Ultimately, Bolsonaro had to backtrack early this year and thank China for fast-tracking the vaccine, as Brazil faced a deadly wave of the pandemic, with few vaccines available.”
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“The thing standing in the way is the Centrão (Big Center), a bloc of centrist voting parties in Brazil’s Congress. Bolsonaro has basically had to build alliances with these members of Congress, who agree to work with Bolsonaro in exchange for the president basically giving them what they want.
“Bolsonaro has actually gotten pretty good at handing out goodies — like pork-barrel projects — for the members of Congress to bring home the bacon and show their voters that they’re doing their job,” said David Samuels, distinguished McKnight University professor of political science at the University of Minnesota. “And so they’re also happy to see Bolsonaro twist in the wind as long as he keeps the spigots of money going.”
Experts said it’s going to take a lot for them to basically turn their back on those goodies — whether they’re cushy jobs or beneficial projects. An investigation by the Brazilian newspaper O Estado de S. Paulo found that Bolsonaro’s government set aside about 20 billion reais ($3.9 billion) for what are basically pork projects.
“The question for impeachment becomes this: Does popular will and senatorial and deputy outrage turn to the point where enough are willing to abandon that sort of legislative sway over the national political agenda for the sake of impeachment?” Snider of the University of Texas said.
“Many Americans did take Covid-19 seriously, social distancing and masking up as federal officials and experts asked them to. They have continued to do so, too, getting vaccines as soon as they were available.
But with Covid-19, just a few people can spoil everything. A few people going out, gathering, and failing to wear masks can launch an outbreak across a community. That ends up exposing not just the people in the initial outbreak but anyone else who gets caught in the subsequent contact chain. Maybe someone contracted Covid-19 by hosting an ill-advised Halloween party, and then spread the coronavirus further when he went into work, bought groceries, picked up food at a restaurant, and visited family. A single person’s mistake can have a lot of fallout.”
“the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that nearly 9.5 million more women than men have been vaccinated in the U.S.,1 and in the 42 states2 that collect gender data, a greater share of women are getting the vaccine as well. The magnitude of the gender gap varies from state to state but has hovered just below 10 percentage points on average over the past month.”
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“The simplest explanation for the vaccine gender gap is that women got a head start. Among older Americans, who had early access to the vaccine, women outnumber men”
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“those early restrictions on who could get the vaccine are gone now. The numbers remain imbalanced, however, so other factors must be contributing to the disparity as well.”
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“COVID-19 isn’t the only health matter that men are less likely to be proactive about. Compared with women, they tend to see a doctor less often and use harmful substances like alcohol and illicit drugs more often; men also tend to eat less fiber and fruit, and they are even less likely to use sunscreen when compared to women. According to Dr. Jonathan Metzl, director of the Center for Medicine, Health, and Society at Vanderbilt University, men’s shorter lifespans are the result of the cumulative effects of poor health decisions, not physiology. “There’s no real biological reason that men die earlier,” said Metzl. “The things that make you a successful, cool, tough man in America are also inversely related to health and longevity.”
Researchers are nearly unanimous in their assertion that traditional masculinity — the idea that men should be self-reliant, physically tough and emotionally stoic — is a risk factor for men’s health. James Mahalik, an expert on masculinity and health outcomes at Boston College, studies how traditional masculinity gets in the way of health-promoting behaviors. His lab’s research on mask-wearing indicates that men who conform to traditional masculine norms have lower levels of empathy toward people who are vulnerable to COVID-19, and they are less likely to trust the scientific community. Mahalik suspects the same is true for their views about the vaccine.”
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“women are typically held responsible for the health of others in ways that men are not: “Women know that if members of their family become sick, they’re the ones who will be responsible for caregiving.” Although vaccine distributors don’t track the gender of people who schedule vaccine appointments for family members, sociologists are concerned that women are taking on the brunt of this work — an extension of what has been called women’s “second shift.” Women’s greater responsibility for maintaining not just their own health but the health of others makes Reich suspect that women are more likely to be in contact with health services and seek out health-related information. Social expectations that women care for others and vigilantly monitor their reproductive health demand it of them.”
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“gender differences in susceptibility to COVID-19 misinformation: Early in the pandemic, men — particularly those who identified as conservatives — were more likely than women to subscribe to COVID-19 conspiracy theories.”
“But it’s one thing to come up with a vaccine, and entirely something else to manufacture it on a mass scale. That’s where the world has stumbled and where concerted planning now can make sure we’re prepared for the future. If we’re to have a better chance to fight the next pandemic — and there will be a next one — the US needs to build on these vaccine tech innovations and make investments to establish permanent facilities producing mRNA and adenovirus vaccines.”
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“that slack won’t arrive naturally.
Weber, the former assistant secretary of defense for biodefense, has pushed for what he dubs a “10 + 10 Over 10” plan to prevent biological threats in the future. It is essentially a big government investment that could enable the kind of infrastructure necessary to have gotten to full vaccine availability in the US in, say, one or two months, not five.
The plan calls for $10 billion in additional annual funding for the Department of Defense, and another $10 billion per year for the Department of Health and Human Services, devoted to anticipating pandemic and other biological risks, for at least 10 years.
With that funding, government could finance the infrastructure for year-round vaccine manufacture.”
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“The key is that these facilities need to be active during non-pandemic times, otherwise their expertise and readiness could deteriorate.”
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“Pharmaceutical companies are not going to go this big on their own, and there’s no guarantee that the government will fund them sufficiently without pressure. In 2020 — during the pandemic — the Trump administration cut the DOD’s chemical and biodefense programs by 10 percent, with much of the cuts going to the vaccine component of the budget. To set this vision in motion, the US needs to not just reverse cuts like that but spend much more, in line with Weber’s $20 billion per year proposal.”
“The United States alone is estimated to have had 905,000 Covid-19 fatalities, vastly more than the 579,000 deaths officially reported, and more than any other country. The calculation is based on modeling of excess mortality that has occurred during the pandemic.
The drastic difference highlights how difficult it is to keep track of even basic metrics like deaths when a deadly disease is raging. The higher toll also means the ripples of the pandemic have spread wider than realized, particularly for health workers on the front lines who have repeatedly faced the onslaught with limited medical resources and personal protection. And the undercounts have important consequences for how countries allocate resources, anticipate future hot spots, and address health inequities.”
“The economy added 266,000 jobs in April according to today’s report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), while the unemployment rate ticked up slightly to 6.1 percent, from 6 percent.
These numbers are well below forecasts from economists who predicted that April would see the addition of around 1 million jobs, and the unemployment rate falling to 5.8 percent. The BLS report notes that we’re still far away from a pre-pandemic labor market, when the jobless rate sat at 3.5 percent.
Despite persistent levels of high joblessness, other metrics show signs of a labor market that’s increasingly tight.”
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“job openings and the number of workers quitting their jobs were at record highs and that wages were growing at 2019 levels (when the country’s economy was booming).
Employers, meanwhile, find themselves in increasingly dire straits trying to find new workers.”
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“what’s causing this weird mismatch between labor supply and demand?
Furman and Powell cite three possible explanations: continual health concerns about contracting COVID-19 at work encouraging some people to stay home, school closures keeping parents out of the workforce, and generous unemployment benefits.
The $300 weekly unemployment supplement provided as part of the March-passed American Rescue Plan pays some 42 percent of workers more than what they made at their old jobs, according to a University of Chicago analysis.
That $300 supplement will continue until September 2021. Today’s jobs report has business interests calling for ending it now.”
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“The consensus among economists is that high unemployment benefits were not producing high unemployment rates earlier in the pandemic, when there were so few jobs available, health concerns were more acute, and there was greater uncertainty about when the economy would improve.
Workers who found themselves in that precarious situation would jump at any employment opportunity they could find, even if it paid less than unemployment benefits, the thinking went.
The situation today is much different.
Vaccinations and falling cases and deaths should ameliorate many of the health concerns people have about returning to work. A wealth of job opportunities also means people receiving unemployment benefits now won’t automatically take whatever work they can find. Instead, they can afford to hold out for higher wages or a job that’s a better fit for them.”
“In February 2020, 27 scientists penned an open letter in The Lancet saying “scientists from multiple countries have published and analyzed genomes of the causative agent … SARS-CoV-2, and they overwhelmingly conclude that this coronavirus originated in wildlife.” “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that Covid-19 does not have a natural origin,” the scientists wrote.”
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“Several former national security and White House officials said they felt the circumstantial evidence they gathered in the spring of 2020 pushed them to believe the virus had originated in the lab.
“Just as a matter of common sense, the CCP destroyed virus samples, they only let the WHO investigation into the laboratory for three and a half hours, they bleached the site of the wet market, they didn’t let Taiwan into the World Health Assembly, not to mention that this lab was so close to the center of the outbreak,” one former senior State Department official said. “To me, I just thought right away, this came from the lab.””
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““It’s entirely plausible this came from a lab, and it’s also entirely plausible it came from nature. As an intel analyst, you look at a whole set of coincidences and you start to wonder if they’re really coincidences. A lab working on this very issue as a locus for an outbreak — that’s a heck of a coincidence,” said Emily Harding, a former CIA analyst who was deputy staff director for the Senate intelligence committee last year.”
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“One of those reports, circulated internally in May 2020 by the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s intelligence unit, said it pulled on genomic analyses of the SARS-CoV-2 virus to determine that it was plausible that Covid-19 originated in the Wuhan lab, according to two individuals familiar with the classified report.
Another report, published in the scientific journal Cell by Chinese and American researchers made its way to Ruggiero’s NSC directorate. The authors had studied mice with humanized lungs and tracked how they responded to the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Although the special mice were created years before the virus emerged, the study led officials on Ruggiero’s team to determine that the virus could have originated in the lab in 2019.
Over the course of 2020, the Trump administration gathered evidence that showed researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology became sick in November 2019 “with symptoms consistent with both Covid-19 and common seasonal illness,” according to a State Department fact sheet published in January 2020 just before the inauguration of President Joe Biden. Months later, on May 23, 2021, the Wall Street Journal reported more details about that incident, including that there were three researchers — all of whom sought medical care from a hospital.
But those reports described the researchers’ symptoms as “consistent with” Covid-19 and other well-known viruses such as the flu. Nor is it clear whether the scientists worked with bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan institute, a large research facility in a city bigger than New York. Many studies have suggested that Covid was already circulating in Wuhan by November 2019, so it’s possible the scientists could have been infected outside of work.”
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“Last month, Biden ordered the intelligence community to redouble its efforts in studying the origins questions. It’s unclear whether the Biden administration has obtained new intelligence from China or elsewhere that will help officials come to a clearer determination than the Trump administration did.”
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“with China refusing to share vital lab data with the U.S., the Biden officials face a similar challenge as the Trump officials who kick-started the probe in 2020. They will have to rely in part on circumstantial evidence that could prevent them from reaching a conclusion on whether the virus originated in the Wuhan lab.
“It seems unlikely that we will get a definitive answer on Covid’s origins in 90 days, or maybe ever. My guess is that if a lab leak did occur, the likelihood of gaining access to definitive evidence would be near zero. This would be among the most closely protected secrets in the history of the Communist Party,” said Zack Cooper, a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. “That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t continue to press to get answers, but we should be realistic about the likelihood that we’ll have definitive proof in 90 days.””