“Chicago Public Schools, though, has already implemented many of the mitigation strategies that government planners have in mind, and the district believes teachers can safely go back to class. Officials have good reason to think this: Outside major cities, many schools—including a great number of private schools that lack easy access to government dollars—have been open since at least September, and there’s simply no evidence of widespread disease in classrooms. Schools have not played host to superspreader events, and there’s little reason to think that students are infecting their teachers. Even the CDC, which is hardly known for taking an incautious approach to resuming normal life, says that schools can reopen safely.”
“There was a really open question: Are schools going to be the locus of tremendous spread? That conversation has shifted a lot, but in the summer there was this idea that we’re going to open schools and that’s going to be the thing that destroys everything.
That does not seem to be true. We’re not seeing schools as the locus of large amounts of spread. The rates are actually quite low—even though the way we measure rates, just to be clear, is not spread in schools, but just people affiliated with schools who have COVID. So it doesn’t mean they got it at the school. But even there, we’re seeing rates that are pretty much in line with what we’re seeing in the community. Maybe a little bit lower for students, maybe a little bit higher for staff.
We’re seeing fairly optimistic information about the idea that you could have schools operate safely, even in areas where there’s some reasonable amount of community spread. Masking probably does matter. That’s probably the most robust correlate in the data, that those places that are masking seem to have much lower rates than places that are not. But I think the thing that we got the most attention for—rightly, because it moved people’s priors a lot—was just this idea that not everyone at the school got COVID the day it opened.
We are seeing some of these differences across age groups. To the extent that there are places with larger numbers of cases, they seem to be high schools.”
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“we have seen the thing that people feared at the college level. Not at all colleges, but a lot. When Penn State opened, you could see on a COVID map where Penn State is, because it was just totally overwhelmed. In some ways I find it actually surprising that we have not seen more high schools that looked like that. And I’m not sure why that’s so different.”
“It didn’t take long for the two scientific faces of former President Donald Trump’s failed coronavirus response to speak out about how dysfunctional efforts to curb the pandemic really were under the 45th president.
On the first weekend following Trump’s departure from the White House, Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx — both members of the Trump White House coronavirus task force coordinated by Birx — did interviews with national media outlets in which they described a culture in the Trump White House that discounted scientific expertise and put a premium on the type of denialism that resulted in Trump continuing to hold packed political rallies even as coronavirus deaths and cases soared in the fall.
“We would say things like: ‘This is an outbreak. Infectious diseases run their own course unless one does something to intervene.’ And then he would get up and start talking about, ‘It’s going to go away, it’s magical, it’s going to disappear,’” Fauci told the New York Times.
Birx made similar comments to CBS during an interview with Face the Nation host Margaret Brennan, saying, “there were people [in the White House] who definitely believed that this was a hoax,” and adding that Trump had a penchant for listening to people who told him what he wanted to hear, even if that information had no scientific basis.
“I saw the president presenting graphs that I never made,” she said. “So I know that someone — someone out there, or someone inside — was creating a parallel set of data and graphics that were shown to the president. I don’t know to this day who, but I know what I sent up, and I know what was in his hands was different than that.”
Fauci corroborated that point, telling the Times that in the early days of the pandemic, he was “really concerned” to observe that Trump “was getting input from people who were calling him up, I don’t know who, people he knew from business, saying, ‘Hey, I heard about this drug, isn’t it great?’ or, ‘Boy, this convalescent plasma is really phenomenal.’”
“He would take just as seriously their opinion — based on no data, just anecdote — that something might really be important,” added Fauci. “It wasn’t just hydroxychloroquine, it was a variety of alternative-medicine-type approaches. It was always, ‘A guy called me up, a friend of mine from blah, blah, blah.’ That’s when my anxiety started to escalate.””
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“What Birx and Fauci said during their interviews isn’t necessarily surprising. We’ve long understood that the Trump White House’s coronavirus response was a disaster, especially when compared with countries like Australia and Japan that have done a much better job limiting infections and deaths. We’ve known that Trump has a tendency to engage in wishful thinking and has an aversion to scientific reasoning.
But what Birx’s and Fauci’s willingness to speak out in the immediate aftermath of Trump’s departure from office does illustrate is just how bad things were under the previous administration. It now falls upon the Biden administration to try to clean up the mess left behind after a year of politically motivated short-term thinking, in which public health experts like Fauci and Birx had to struggle on a daily basis with questions about whether it was worth it for them to keep showing up at work.”
“Regal Cinemas announced in early October that it will temporarily close all 536 of its U.S. locations as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to keep customers away. This move affects about 40,000 employees across the country. Yet nobody in Congress is talking about a bailout for theaters.
Now compare that with the airline industry.
In April, Congress passed a $50 billion bailout for the airlines, including $25 billion in subsidized loans and another $25 billion meant to keep most airline workers employed until the end of September. As predicted, since consumers were not yet ready to fly, this taxpayer-funded band-aid only postponed the inevitable.”
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“Some companies are taking a different approach to retaining their employees. Southwest Airlines, for example, is asking its labor unions to accept pay cuts through the end of 2021 to prevent furloughs and layoffs. Singapore Airlines has done the same.
Airlines also have access to capital markets and have many durable assets they can sell or use as collateral to secure additional financing, even during a crisis. And even without sacrificing these lucrative assets, airlines can turn to their credit-card-issuing partners for liquidity, as they have in response to past financial challenges.
Sadly, as long as demand for air travel remains deflated, there will be no way for airlines to avoid slimming down their payrolls. Subsidies provided under the cover of payroll programs are not necessary to protect an industry that can, and perhaps should, pursue restructuring through bankruptcy. Airlines can continue to fly safely during this process as a judge imposes a stay on creditors’ claims and gives the carriers breathing room until consumers are ready to come back.
Unlike special favors granted by Congress, the bankruptcy process is equitable. It shifts the cost of the crisis onto airline investors, who make good returns during good times in exchange for shouldering the decreased value of their investments during bad times, instead of taxpayers. Without another bailout, the skies that the airlines fly will be fair as well as friendly.”
“Biden has made ending the pandemic a centerpiece of his early presidency, vowing an all-out federal effort to turn the tide of the crisis within the next several months.
But even as he signed a flurry of directives laying the foundation for that response, White House officials have sought to tamp down expectations — blaming the Trump administration for leaving behind a situation that they insisted was far worse than expected, despite months of transition meetings and planning.
“What we’re inheriting from the Trump administration is so much worse than we could have imagined,” Jeff Zients, Biden’s Covid-19 coordinator, told reporters Wednesday night. “We don’t have the visibility that we would hope to have into supply and allocations.”
Biden officials complained during the transition that their efforts to gather information on the coronavirus response were stymied at times by Trump administration political appointees. Biden aides for weeks were unable to access Tiberius, the central government database used to monitor vaccine distributions, according to one transition official. They were also denied access to certain standing meetings related to the government’s response until a few days before Biden was sworn in.
Yet while few disputed the transition was rocky, officials working on the transition or familiar with its work said it was patently obvious that the Trump administration response was severely lacking, and it should have been no surprise to Biden’s team.
That is particularly the case with the vaccine pipeline, which has been at the center of weeks of finger-pointing between states and the federal government over the slow pace of vaccinations.”
“Biden is releasing a national plan. It’s a broad outline, but the general idea is that the federal government should take a more hands-on strategy: providing reliable guidance to the public; proactively supplying states with the resources they need to test, contact trace, and vaccinate; taking a stronger global role on pandemic response; and emphasizing equity in all aspects of the administration’s work.
At the top of the agenda is the overarching goal: 100 million vaccine shots in 100 days. Some experts argue that goal doesn’t go far enough, but the Biden administration says it’s faster than the current vaccination rate and only the start of a process that will span months.
Biden’s team repeatedly acknowledged to reporters that they’ll need Congress’s support to get all of this done, including meeting the administration’s vaccination goal. But Biden is trying to get the ball rolling with a suite of executive actions that, in the administration’s view, chip away at some of the current gaps in the federal response.”
“In the U.S., a botched and politicized COVID-19 vaccine distribution process seems to be fueling a black market in vaccines.
Anyone with knowledge of their fellow humans could have seen this coming. Limited supplies and controlled distribution of a product in high demand incentivize people to jump the line, or to make money by offering to help others do so.
“There absolutely will be a black market,” New York University bioethicist Arthur Caplan commented at the beginning of December. “Anything that’s seen as lifesaving, life-preserving, and that’s in short supply creates black markets.””
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“In the end, federal promises of 20 million vaccinations administered by the end of the year were off by a lot, with the actual number just over 2 million.”
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“Cochrane believes governments should have got out of the way of companies that could have sold people what they need to deal with the pandemic, including vaccines. “The government could buy too,” he offers, but “allowing the vaccine to go to the highest bidders—and allowing people to get it at CVS or administer it themselves—would have rolled vaccines out much faster.””
“Netanyahu declared that Israel will be a “global model state for the rapid vaccination of an entire country.” But how much Israel’s success can be replicated abroad is hard to say. Israel’s small and densely packed population has eased some of the logistical and operational challenges of delivering the vaccine. And Israel’s universal health care system, which has easily accessible records for all citizens, has massively facilitated the program.”