Harry (10 months) participated in the Moderna trial yesterday! He had blood work to confirm he has no previous COVID antibodies and then went back for the blinded trial. He goes back in three weeks for the next injection. The coordinator hopes the trial will be unblinded within 60 days after the second dose, then we'll know if he had the vaccine or just the placebo. No reaction for him so far, totally normal happy Harry.
Our school district authorized that we remove the plexi glass from student desks. No need to social distance anymore. And we have 100 percent negative Covid testing rate in our scho of 2900. We test weekly using the oral method.
That’s just wonderful news @nala!
Haha. We are all a bit suspicious, tbh. But it is what it is!
I just looked up the oral testing. It seems very accurate…
I’m suspicious of everyone now. My oldest son just got a PCR test. It was negative so I let him hug me.. I told him that’s it until he gets another test..He knows I’m not kidding either..hahaha
Good morning. The partisan gap in Covid deaths has grown larger. |
As 2020 wound down, there were good reasons to believe that the death toll during the pandemic’s first year might have been worse in red America. There were also good reasons to think it might have been worse in blue America. |
Conservative areas tend to be older, less prosperous and more hostile to mask wearing, all of which can exacerbate the spread or severity of Covid-19. Liberal areas, for their part, are home both to more busy international airports and more Americans who suffer the health consequences of racial discrimination. |
But it turned out that these differences largely offset each other in 2020 — or maybe they didn’t matter as much as some people assumed. Either way, the per capita death toll in blue America and red America was similar by the final weeks of 2020. |
It was only a few percentage points higher in counties where Donald Trump had won at least 60 percent of the vote than in counties where Joe Biden crossed that threshold. In counties where neither candidate won 60 percent, the death toll was higher than in either Trump or Biden counties. There simply was not a strong partisan pattern to Covid during the first year that it was circulating in the U.S. |
Then the vaccines arrived. |
They proved so powerful, and the partisan attitudes toward them so different, that a gap in Covid’s death toll quickly emerged. I have covered that gap in two newsletters — one this summer, one last month — and today’s newsletter offers an update. |
The brief version: The gap in Covid’s death toll between red and blue America has grown faster over the past month than at any previous point. |
In October, 25 out of every 100,000 residents of heavily Trump counties died from Covid, more than three times higher than the rate in heavily Biden counties (7.8 per 100,000). October was the fifth consecutive month that the percentage gap between the death rates in Trump counties and Biden counties widened. |
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Some conservative writers have tried to claim that the gap may stem from regional differences in weather or age, but those arguments fall apart under scrutiny. (If weather or age were a major reason, the pattern would have begun to appear last year.) The true explanation is straightforward: The vaccines are remarkably effective at preventing severe Covid, and almost 40 percent of Republican adults remain unvaccinated, compared with about 10 percent of Democratic adults. |
Charles Gaba, a Democratic health care analyst, has pointed out that the gap is also evident at finer gradations of political analysis: Counties where Trump received at least 70 percent of the vote have an even higher average Covid death toll than counties where Trump won at least 60 percent. |
As a result, Covid deaths have been concentrated in counties outside of major metropolitan areas. Many of these are in red states, while others are in red parts of blue or purple states, like Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, Oregon, Virginia and even California. |
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This situation is a tragedy, in which irrational fears about vaccine side effects have overwhelmed rational fears about a deadly virus. It stems from disinformation — promoted by right-wing media, like Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News, the Sinclair Broadcast Group and online sources — that preys on the distrust that results from stagnant living standards. |
A peak? |
The future of Covid is uncertain, but I do think it’s possible that the partisan gap in Covid deaths reached its peak last month. There are two main reasons to expect the gap may soon shrink. |
One, the new antiviral treatments from Pfizer and Merck seem likely to reduce Covid deaths everywhere, and especially in the places where they are most common. These treatments, along with the vaccines, may eventually turn this coronavirus into just another manageable virus. |
Two, red America has probably built up more natural immunity to Covid — from prior infections — than blue America, because the hostility to vaccination and social distancing has caused the virus to spread more widely. A buildup in natural immunity may be one reason that the partisan gap in new Covid cases has shrunk recently. |
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Death trends tend to lag case trends by a few weeks, which suggests the gap in deaths will shrink in November. |
Still, nobody knows what will happen next. Much of the recent decline in caseloads is mysterious, which means it may not last. And the immunity from vaccination appears to be much stronger than the immunity from infection, which means that conservative Americans will probably continue to suffer an outsized amount of unnecessary illness and death. |
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Good morning. Is it time to start moving back to normalcy? |
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If not now … |
Among the Covid experts I regularly talk with, Dr. Robert Wachter is one of the more cautious. He worries about “long Covid,” and he believes that many people should receive booster shots. He says that he may wear a mask in supermarkets and on airplanes for the rest of his life. |
Yet Wachter — the chair of the medicine department at the University of California, San Francisco — also worries about the downsides of organizing our lives around Covid. In recent weeks, he has begun to think about when most of life’s rhythms should start returning to normal. Increasingly, he believes the answer is: Now. |
This belief stems from the fact that the virus is unlikely to go away, ever. Like most viruses, it will probably keep circulating, with cases rising sometimes and falling other times. But we have the tools — vaccines, along with an emerging group of treatments — to turn it into a manageable virus, similar to the seasonal flu. |
Given this reality, Wachter, who’s 64, has decided to resume more of his old activities and accept the additional risk that comes with them, much as we accept the risk of crashes when riding in vehicles. |
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He has begun eating in indoor restaurants again and playing poker, unmasked, with vaccinated friends. He has taken airplanes to visit relatives. He hosted a medical conference in downtown San Francisco with a few hundred masked and vaccinated attendees. |
“I’m still going to be thoughtful and careful,” Wachter told The San Francisco Chronicle. But “if I’m not going to do it now, I’m probably saying that I’m not going to do it for the next couple of years, and I might be saying I’m not doing it forever.” |
The hospitalization statistics in highly vaccinated communities help explain Wachter’s attitude. In Seattle (which publishes detailed data), the daily Covid hospitalization rate for vaccinated people has been slightly above one in one million. By comparison, the flu hospitalization rate in a typical year in the U.S. is more than twice as high. For most vaccinated people in a place like Seattle or San Francisco, Covid already resembles just another virus. |
The risks are also low for unvaccinated children because Covid tends to be mild for them. (Plus, any child 5 or older can now be vaccinated.) For young children, Covid looks like a normal flu, if not a mild one: |
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As for long Covid, it is real but rare. It’s also not unique. The flu and other viruses also cause mysterious, lasting problems for a small share of people, studies show. |
The bottom line is that Covid now presents the sort of risk to most vaccinated people that we unthinkingly accept in other parts of life. And there is not going to be a day when we wake up to headlines proclaiming that Covid is defeated. In many ways, the future of the virus has arrived. |
All of which raises the question of which precautions should end — now or soon — and which should become permanent. |
Should offices remain mostly empty? Should schools require children and teachers to wear masks? Should classrooms go remote again when they identify a new Covid case? (In Boston, a K-8 school closed for 10 days starting Wednesday because of an outbreak.) For how long should individuals organize their own lives around a fear of Covid? |
Most of these questions are tricky, and a few factors can guide the decision-making, epidemiologists say. |
1. Local spread |
The lower the rate of Covid spread in a community, the less risk to everyone. The C.D.C. defines a low rate of transmission as, among other things, fewer than 10 new daily cases per 100,000 people. Most of the country is well above that threshold, but parts of the San Francisco, Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, New York and Washington areas are below it. (You can look up your county here.) |
Nevada has taken an approach that experts like Julia Raifman of Boston University have praised: The state will remove mask mandates after cases have fallen below a certain level. Joseph Allen of Harvard, criticizing the different approach in many other places, has said, “We’re sleepwalking into policy because we’re not setting goals.” |
One complication: Nationally, new cases have risen modestly in recent weeks, though they are still far below the levels of late summer. If new cases accelerate as the weather gets colder and more activity moves indoors, it may call for caution. |
2. Illness, not cases |
Still, with vaccines widely available and treatments increasingly so, caseloads are not as important a metric as they once were. They “are becoming less and less useful,” as The Atlantic’s Sarah Zhang has written. More telling measures are hospitalizations and deaths. |
The treatments for people who contract Covid are especially important here. Pfizer’s pill regimen, which seems especially effective, reduces the risk of hospitalization by more than 80 percent. These treatments are another step toward turning Covid into a normal virus rather than one that dominates life. |
3. Vulnerability |
Different people face different levels of Covid risk. For most vaccinated people and children, the risks are extremely low. But for some immunocompromised people — like those who have received organ transplants — the risks are higher. The same is true among people in their 80s and 90s. |
Greater precautions make sense for vulnerable people. They will also particularly benefit if rapid Covid testing ever becomes widely available in the U.S., allowing them to socialize more confidently. |
There is a flip side to this point: The aggregate statistics on Covid deaths and hospitalizations exaggerate the risk to most Americans, because a disproportionate share of severe illness occurs among people with specific medical vulnerabilities. |
4. Cost vs. benefit |
Wachter told me that he might always wear a mask while grocery shopping or flying on a plane because the costs of having a covered face and a muzzled voice in those settings are virtually zero. He isn’t usually trying to have a conversation with somebody. And a mask can help protect him from all sorts of respiratory viruses. |
Unfortunately, the costs of most Covid interventions are higher. Masks inhibit communication, especially for young children and the hard of hearing. (Wachter also says he expects conferences eventually to be maskless.) Remote school has been a failure. Remote office work hampers collaboration. Social isolation causes mental-health problems. |
When The Washington Post recently asked Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University, when the pandemic would end, she replied: “It doesn’t end. We just stop caring. Or we care a lot less.” She added, “I think for most people, it just fades into the background of their lives.” |
I realize that answer may sound jarring, but the alternative — a society permanently dominated by Covid — is jarring, too. Eventually, the costs of organizing our lives around the virus will exceed the benefits. In some cases, we may have already reached that point. |
My 5YO got his first Pfizer!