“Biden is correct that the previous administration made numerous fatal blunders in its handling of the pandemic, and that more clarity and transparency at all levels is an important step in rectifying those mistakes. That will be a welcome change from his predecessor’s failure to roll out sufficient testing, devise an effective reopening strategy for the country, and his numerous inane assertions that the end of the pandemic was nigh, including claims like the virus will disappear “like a miracle” and “this is going to go away without a vaccine” and “the China plague will fade” and “we’re rounding the corner and it’s going away.” Nevertheless the makeup of Biden’s advisory board and his mixed messages on mask mandates give cause for concern, and will be worth keeping an eye on.”
“There are varying schools of thought about whether the president has the authority to issue a national mask mandate, as many other countries have. Some attempts to do so at the state and local level have been met with lawsuits and refusals to comply, as masks have become an increasingly politicized and contentious issue. Biden has said he will issue an executive order requiring masks to be worn on federal property.
Beyond that, Biden’s version of a national mask mandate, as spelled out in his new transition website, does not appear to come from him. Instead, he’s going to be “working with governors and mayors” to encourage them to issue their own mandates, as well as remind Americans to wear masks. While the majority of America’s governors have issued statewide mandates, 16 states have not — including Mississippi, which revoked its mask mandate in October (Gov. Tate Reeves is requiring masks in certain counties).
Though it’s hard to see a reality where states and localities run by Republicans work hand in hand with a Democratic president these days — even in the face of a virus that infects people regardless of their political leanings — many firmly Republican state governments have issued mask mandates once their constituents began getting sick and dying, most recently Utah on Monday. Others still seem to take pride in their obstinance, like South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem. Even in that state, however, local governments are trying to issue their own orders.”
“On December 2, a staggering 2,885 Americans were reported to have died of Covid-19, according to the New York Times. It was the highest single-day toll of the year.
It was nearly the same number of people who died in the 9/11 attacks (2,977). And it was far more than the estimated 1,800 Americans who died over a matter of days when Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast in 2005. During World War II, from the Pearl Harbor attacks in December 1941 to Japan’s surrender, about 300 US soldiers died every day on average (and about 407,000 were dead in total by August 1945).
Unfortunately, the coronavirus pandemic has more in common with a slow-motion tragedy, like a war, than an acute event like 9/11. More than 2,600 deaths were reported on December 1, the day before the US set its new record for daily deaths; the previous high had been 2,752 on April 15. With the number of daily new cases and hospitalizations still rising across the country, public health experts expect new terrible death records will be set over the coming winter.”
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“According to the Johns Hopkins University tracker, the official number of total deaths attributed to Covid-19 in the US is 274,121. But total excess deaths — the number of deaths above what would be expected in a normal year — has reached 345,000, according to the Times. Most, though not all, of those deaths are likely uncounted Covid-19 fatalities.”
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“There is still time to soften the blow, with states and cities implementing more social distancing restrictions and requiring better mask adherence. But barring a sudden change in public behavior and public policy, America’s outbreak is not going to get better anytime soon.
At this point, we appear to be waiting for the vaccine to be widely distributed to bring the virus under control — something that may not happen for another six months or longer. Prioritizing the most vulnerable populations for vaccination should help reduce the death toll, but there is no avoiding the fact that tens of thousands of Americans are likely to die over the next few months.”
“It’s great to have highly effective vaccines, but as the researchers observe, “How well a vaccine program ‘works’ will also depend on how quickly it can be manufactured, how efficiently it can be distributed to locations in greatest need, how persuasive health messaging can be in promoting public acceptance, and how consistently the public can adhere to the many complementary prevention strategies (e.g., masks, hand-washing, distancing) to limit the spread of the virus.”
“Congress created the PPP when it passed the CARES Act in March, aiming to funnel billions of dollars through banks to businesses that were suffering from widespread lockdowns during the pandemic. The loans were mainly meant to cover payroll, a way to keep employees earning money while stopping companies from going under, and were designed to be completely forgiven if used properly.”
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“The SBA released an “EZ application” for PPP forgiveness on June 16, but business owners can’t submit the forms directly to the agency — they have to go through their lenders instead. And both banks and the SBA have barely gotten things off the ground.
According to the Government Accountability Office, the SBA received only about 56,000 decisions on whether to forgive loans from banks by September 8 — which amounts to just 1 percent of the 5.2 million loans issued. None had actually been forgiven as of October 1. Meanwhile, the SBA issued new information and rules on July 23, August 4, and August 11, and it still hadn’t finished creating a process for reviewing lenders’ decisions as of August 14. On October 1, the SBA said it would start forgiving loans after banks and borrowers complained.”
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“Even once the forgiveness process truly gets underway, many business owners aren’t sure exactly what paperwork will be required of them. Sixty-eight percent of the Main Street Alliance survey respondents were concerned that the process wasn’t clear, with two-thirds saying they don’t understand what’s eligible for forgiveness given the many changes in the program, and over half were confused about what documents are required. The details matter: About two-thirds fear not getting their loans forgiven, while 43 percent are concerned they won’t have any recourse if they feel a decision isn’t fair.”
“As of October 21, Japan — a country of around 127 million people — had more than 90,000 confirmed cases of the coronavirus and 1,600 deaths. That’s not bad compared to much of the world, but the pandemic caused the nation’s economy to shrink by around 28 percent between April and June, the largest contraction since the country started keeping records in 1980.
That’s bad news on its own, but Japan was already dealing with a years-long economic slump due in part to an aging workforce. It’s a trend Suga’s keenly aware he must reverse, and doing so starts with minimizing the virus’s spread. “Reviving the economy remains the top priority of the administration,” Suga told reporters just after becoming prime minister on September 16.”
“In the middle of a pandemic that has killed roughly 1 in every 1,020 Black Americans — a disproportionate death toll likely to worsen as coronavirus cases spike in much of the country — it’s not just lives that are being imperiled. Racial wealth gaps are worsening, and progress towards economic equity is being undone.”
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““When the pandemic translates into a disproportionate burden on low-wealth households, that is correlated with race,” says Jones. “The median wealth of white households is between 9 and 10 times as much as the median black household. And during this pandemic, the people with the lowest level of the wealth don’t have the emergency savings to hold themselves over.”
At the same time, Black and Latino workers are more likely to have “frontline” jobs that put them at heightened risk of Covid infection. For many, it’s a bind: You have less of a financial cushion to fall back on and need the work. But the job itself puts you at heightened risk of Covid infection, your health insurance is generally tied to your job, and if you lose it and catch Covid, you face potential financial ruin. Even when the pandemic ends, Jones expects that Black and Latino households will be “worse off, relative to white households, than when it began.””
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“For years, workers have had a continually eroding level of leverage in the workplace. The ways companies have redefined labor as “external contractors” basically causes more and more people to not be covered by workplace protections. During this pandemic, those people couldn’t get unemployment insurance at all. It’s indicative of a larger problem: The labor market is being reoriented in a way where workers have less and less power. One reason that’s important is that if you don’t have a lot of say, you’re going to be stuck between a rock and a hard place: forced to either not work, or to go to work under far less-than-ideal circumstances in terms of protections from Covid infection and other health problems. Do they have the right protective equipment? Do they have sick leave? Probably not.
Related to health care, we have health insurance driven by where you’re employed. During a time like this — a pandemic with acute and chronic health implications and high rates of unemployment — going in and out of access to health care is particularly devastating. In the long run, we need some form of universal health care access to offset this problem of people losing their access to health care if they lose their jobs.”
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” We found that people are sensitive to changes in their paychecks from month to month, and that’s particularly true for Black and Latinx households and households with a low level of liquid assets. What I mean by liquid assets are savings and other assets that are either cash or which can be quickly converted into cash — so your bank account, your savings account, and some investments you can quickly cash out. The households with the lowest level of liquid assets had the most vulnerability. When there were changes in their income, they had to make bigger adjustments, or adjustments that were going to be more painful. Relative to white households, Black and Latino households were more sensitive to those fluctuations, and that seems to be a result of the fact those households generally have less in terms of liquid assets, which is related to broader racial wealth gaps driven by a number of factors”
“The past few months have been an American experiment with Covid-19: Can the country keep bars, restaurants, gyms, and other businesses open while fighting the virus with milder measures, including some social distancing and widespread masking?
Six months after spring shutdowns ended, the answer is clear: The milder approach isn’t working.
The US surpassed 100,000 daily new coronavirus cases on November 4, and it’s gone on to regularly break new records for coronavirus cases since then — with the most recent high exceeding 180,000 on Friday. Hospitalizations have skyrocketed to their highest level of the pandemic, leaving a growing number of hospitals around the US, from Arizona and Texas to Ohio and Tennessee, nearing or at capacity. And deaths are climbing: now above 1,000 a day once again, with a growing likelihood that the country will surpass 2,000 or even 3,000 a day in the coming weeks and months — on top of the more than 246,000 Covid-19 deaths that America has seen so far.”
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“To avert possibly hundreds of thousands of deaths in the months before a vaccine becomes widely available, the US needs to close down once again. That means temporarily shuttering in-person, indoor services at nonessential businesses, particularly bars and restaurants; restricting larger gatherings, including in private homes; and encouraging, or outright mandating, people to stay home as much as possible — only going out for food, work, exercise, health care, and other basics needs — and limit their social interactions to their own households.”
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“if closing down is necessary again, Congress should make similar moves — from boosting unemployment insurance to offering financial aid, even a bailout, to the businesses most affected. This wouldn’t just ease people’s economic suffering but also make closing down more bearable and, as a result, more sustainable.”
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“we’ve now seen again and again what happens when countries try to keep indoor businesses in particular open as cases remain elevated or go up. Unlike many countries in Europe, Asia, and Oceania, the US never truly suppressed cases, outside of a handful of states, largely because it moved to reopen so quickly. That’s left the country in a vulnerable position as we barrel to what may be the worst Covid-19 outbreak the country will ever see.”
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“A Health Affairs study found government-imposed social distancing measures reduced the growth rate of coronavirus cases, particularly the longer measures remained in place. A study in The Lancet produced similar results. A study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention of Delaware found its lockdown, paired with contact tracing and a mask mandate, contributed to 80-plus percent drops in coronavirus cases, hospitalizations, and deaths by the summer.
A more pessimistic working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that, while lockdowns reduced Covid-19 cases, their effect might have been limited because people were already voluntarily staying home at the time. But that still means the concept of people social distancing and limiting their interactions is effective. (That differs from the situation today, where increasingly fewer people are voluntarily distancing.)”
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“In September, Israel suffered what was the worst Covid-19 outbreak in the world at the time. The country first tried milder, more targeted measures — and, after they failed, imposed a lockdown. And despite some public opposition, it worked to massively reduce cases from October to this month.”
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“There are real downsides to closing down. Throughout the pandemic, people have reported more mental health problems, and drug overdose deaths have increased. There are massive economic problems, with the spring lockdown producing record-shattering unemployment filings (in the millions) and likely increases in poverty only averted by the CARES Act passed by Congress.
The effects of the lockdown were also unequal. While wealthier people in office jobs could largely transition to working from home, lower-income workers either lost their jobs as their employers shut down or were effectively forced to work in “essential” workplaces. A Nature study, looking at cellphone data, found that mobility during the spring lockdown dropped significantly more in higher-income communities than in their lower-income counterparts.”
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“many of these problems could be mitigated with more action by Congress.”
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“A key mistake made during the spring lockdown is that the US didn’t use the time it bought productively. Instead of building a national testing and tracing system, President Donald Trump’s administration punted the issue down to the states. Congress and state officials should take steps to ensure things go differently this time around — building up testing and tracing regimes, and full cooperation between states’ systems, to keep the US safe as cases are, hopefully, suppressed closer to zero.
In addition, all levels of government could use the time to prepare for widespread vaccine distribution.”
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“A big reason that states aren’t closing down right now is because they simply don’t have the resources or reach, especially as they deal with an economic downturn, to offer enough financial support to individuals and businesses hurt by new restrictions. The federal government does.”
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“The alternative, at the current rates of spread, is we go through the winter and into the spring with a widespread scourge that kills possibly hundreds of thousands of Americans and, ironically, impedes our ability to reopen more of the economy as much of the public remains terrified of going out while cases are high and it takes months to roll out a vaccine. (There’s historical evidence for this: A preliminary study of the 1918 flu pandemic found the US cities that took stronger measures against outbreaks saw quicker economic recoveries.)
Everyone wants to go back to normal. As unpopular as closing down may be right now, it’s how we can do it sooner rather than later.”
“The study, which was published in the journal Nature, used cellphone data to track the hourly movements of 98 million people from 57,000 neighborhoods to points of interest, like restaurants, churches and stores, for two months, starting in March. The location data, which was collected by SafeGraph, a company that aggregates anonymous location data from mobile apps, came from 10 of the largest U.S. cities, including Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, New York and Philadelphia.
The research team then compared those movements with COVID-19 case counts for each area. Next they used a model to simulate different scenarios, like reopening some venues while others stayed closed. The researchers also estimated COVID-19 infections based on restrictions, or lack thereof, in these areas.
Overall, the researchers determined that opening restaurants at full capacity led to the largest increase in infections. Opening gyms, cafes, hotels and motels at full capacity also created a jump in infections.”
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“It’s not all doom and gloom: The researchers found that putting a 30 percent occupancy cap on all venues could dramatically decrease infections. Infections were further decreased when the cap was at 20 percent.
It’s important to note that this is a model — it didn’t definitively link cases to these spots. Instead it found that the locations are likely to contribute to the spread of the virus.
But there have been real-world examples that suggest the latest findings are onto something. In October, an indoor spin class in Canada was linked to at least 69 cases of COVID-19. In May, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shared a case report detailing how up to 87 percent of the members of a choir in Washington state became infected after a 2.5-hour practice alongside a member with COVID-19 who was asymptomatic. And a report published by the CDC in September found that adults who tested positive for COVID-19 were twice as likely to have reported dining out at a restaurant than those who did not contract the virus.”