I feel like the GOP is a lot closer now to the fictional cabal that started The Purge, because for twelve months now they've been psyching themselves up with "cull the weak" messaging.
Heebie, until you and Jammies have full shots in your arms, I would be "super angry" too. Abbott's move is *monstrous*. [and this is ignoring that kids can get the virus and some can be injured by it, a few even killed].
It's *monstrous*.
It's Culture War all the way down.
Jammies got his shot. I'm biding my time.
Cause that's the kind of guy I'm....
BTW, here's a link to get on a standby list whenever there's an extra dose that needs to get put in an arm. You have to respond to a text message in 15 minutes, and show up within 2 hours.
We start phase 1B+ next Monday, and that includes both of us. So, we'll get to experience the thrill of the chase for a vaccination appointment.
Abbott's move will open the floodgates for other Republican governors to follow suit, making true Michael Osterholm's prediction three weeks ago that the worst of the pandemic is still ahead of us.
Our governor has returned to being a pretty good governor despite being Republican, now that he doesn't have to worry about a primary or losing to the libertarian. We're actually doing the straightforward smart fair thing of just using age and going down by 5. We just hit 55+ today.
Baker is opening up MA indoor dining 100% even as they are trying to get school to 100% in person in April. Priorities. But we have the hospital capacity now, so go for it!
Iowa just legalized selling loosies at junior high schools.
In North Carolina you can get a shot if you smoke five packs of cigarettes in the next three weeks.
Abbott's self-interest is not served by having fewer Texas residents killed by COVID-19, but by signaling to the GOP base that he's sticking it to the libs. Even the ongoing economic harm is pretty much irrelevant. If things improve, it was due to Abbott's rock-jawed resolve. If they don't, it was Biden and AOC's antifa warrior squad that hate normal people like you.
Ugh. The schools thing hadn't even occurred to me.
15 I like you've described the incentive structure accurately. And it's probably going to work for Abbot. I'm not saying it isn't dumb, but this isn't May, or September 2020. A bunch of the most vulnerable people have had the shot, and in a month a whole bunch more will have had it. People are going to die, absolutely, but the numbers are going to be lowish, aren't they?
Plus, public health is really a personal responsibility.
On Friday I walked past a local bar and it was packed with unmasked people and today I saw the nicely typeset announcement on Facebook that said, to paraphrase, "oopsie, we had a covid on Friday get tested lol."
Ain't no vaccine for stupidity.
1. The shit did not hit in March.
2. Smart people: what lessons, if any, can we draw from the performance so far of the Western/Chinese/other pharma complexes in the vaccine race?
Why is Sp/utn/ik V as good as it is? Does it reveal any particular Russian genius?
Is Co/nvid/icea solid?
Am I right in guessing the Chinese efforts have been not bad scientifically? (Setting aside the government rolling out barely-working Co/ro/nav/ac presumably for propaganda reasons.)
2. Russia has a lot of historical vaccine knowledge. I think their decision to use their particular engineered human adenovirus vector was lucky, but it looks smart in hindsight. I think their data are legit.
The Covidnea is roughly the same technology as the JNJ and AZ vaccines (and the Gamaleya one). Their efficacy numbers appear similar, but the geographical variability on the clinical trial data put out for both the Chinese vaccines worries me (quick scan on the Covidnea, not a deep dive), and I really, really worry about their manufacturing and quality assurance processes, particularly for something high profile and rush. The JNJ showed some variability but not as much, which suggests to me that their data may not be as solid as one might hope (or they didn't design the trial to do enough sequencing, or to get relevant analysis on that variability).
The Sinovac one they're pushing is the oldest technology, and it was the lowest-risk approach to getting something that would work moderately well. I don't think the outcome was particularly good in a predictable way, but if you're looking at an emergency where you save 40% of lives that would otherwise be lost, I can't really fault them for taking a conservative approach that would probably do that.
1. is true, but nevertheless there is a lot of breathless reporting on the anniversary right now.
But the fan is not always spinning!
Welcoming your progeny to their third world future!
22, 24: sure, it's not the anniversary of the start of the pandemic, that was in 2019, hence the name. But March is when lockdowns started in my area and when both of our jobs went fully remote, so that's what feels relevant to me. Cassandane went back to the office in June or July to get some personal stuff and there was still St. Patrick's Day decorations up. March 7 or 14 was the last time I went to a restaurant without a mask.
I caught on that this was going to be locally serious late. Monday, March 9th, I told Sally that she should cancel her plan to go to Germany for spring break, but I had to really think about whether I thought it was necessary. Over the course of that week, my office went from "you may not work at home. If you're sick, take sick leave" on Tuesday, to "look, it's not official office policy and you still have to work a full day in the office, but informal flextime so you can avoid being on the subway at rush hour is fine," to a phone call on Sunday saying don't come into work Monday. I've only been in my office once since then.
I've been to my office twice, and to office-related appointments nearby at least two more times. I look for excuses to go. I miss it. Not the place (a windowless basement) or the people (the few I liked working with are gone now for reasons unrelated to the pandemic) but the lifestyle. Having a physical office enforced a modicum of work/life balance, my commute was a little meditative, and I didn't have to worry about the kid on 90+ percent of normal school days.
I remember my last trip to the liquor store before shutting down, I bought Irish whiskey for St. Patrick's .
I was getting e-mails Bout limiting the size of gatherings and not being able to go to conferences for a month, but in January and February we were focused on Tim's Dad and then his helping his mother. We were being told for a while that it only mattered if people had travelled it once Italy joined the list of countries to worry about, I got worried that the screening was just a joke, I had surgery even though my throat was scratchy because I had a feeling it would never happen if I didn't get it done sometime toward the end of February.
Thursday 3/5 I heard stories about the Biogen folks and the pharma companies telling their employees to stay home. Somebody at Biogen had forwarded a company e-mail to a coworker of Tim's, and it felt like we were not acting quickly enough.
The next week I was worried about exposure, because I heard about someone who was exposed and took their face mask off. Even though the hospital did not make its remote work decision until 3/14, my boss had us working at home. On 3/12 I watched a remote on,t grand rounds, and The epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch said some thing related to Wuhan which "on a per capital basis is more than the ICU capacity of the United States." That and his flatten the curve graph made me say, "oh, shit."
Remote *only* - except for 2 people in the auditorium.
I just looked back. We got the order to work from home on 3/11.
I expensed a March bus pass, which I barely used.
Unfogged was definitely panicking in advance of anything I saw in real life. The president of Heebie U tells the story of the meeting of mucky-mucks, the Thursday before spring break. I was there as a faculty representative. The conversation was whether to extend Spring Break an extra week, or to wait until during Spring Break to decide.
She says that I stood up and told everyone exactly how the rest of the year was going to go. I just remember feeling bewildered that apparently not everyone reads Unfogged and was in full-fledge panic mode, which was the only appropriate mode to be in. I also felt very strongly that students needed to know that they should pack their medications and anything else that they may need to have for the forseeable future, and was worried that if we were mealy-mouthed, we'd do them a major disservice.
When the NBA shut down, I felt deeply relieved, because it was like finally a mainstream authority was taking it seriously.
Right now, I am seeing a lot of people saying "Remember when we thought it would only be 2 weeks, and then 4 weeks, and then 6 weeks? lol" and I think to myself "Remember when your defense mechanisms prevented you from realizing that it was obviously not going to be 2 or 4 or 6 weeks?"
I pride myself on my early sense of overwhelming vertigo.
Yes. We were told pretty early on that we were going to work from home for at least the rest of the year.
Although here on March 5th, I explicitly said that I'd just had my first consideration of what a 2 week quarantine might entail.
And now that it is warm again, I have two elderly ladies sitting on my retaining wall to chat. They are complaining about an acquaintance who is a Trump supporter.
Tuesday 3/10 my office got told not to come back in until further notice - the California offices had already done so and there was starting to be a lot of agitation about the fact that we hadn't. My wife went to work and my kid went to school on Wednesday, and that was the last time I had the house to myself. Wednesday there was a potential exposure at school, which at first became "no school Thursday while we clean", then "oops, three exposures in two schools, closing the whole district for two days for deep cleaning", then over the weekend it all shut down. My wife preemptively stayed home without formal approval and missed the spectacle of her co-workers screaming at each other about whether they should have to stay at the office or not.
This was also about three weeks after we'd been on vacation in Mexico (where we had brought ourselves super-intense peroxide wipes for the airplane), and in retrospect it's distressingly close how poorly that trip could have gone (including the bit where my son got a fever while there - probably something boring but not too much later and it would have caused a huge amount of panic).
The conversation in 37 would have been on Thursday, March 12th. By that point we'd had a solid week on Unfogged with our eyes wide open.
40: We were told June, and I told my boss that the. Urus was not going to disappear after the surge until we had vaccines.
Somewhat to my surprise, I'm getting my first dose of the vaccine tomorrow. When I signed up, I answered "no" to all of the questions that might have bumped me up in the priority list, like "Do you treat patients?", "Does your work require you to be on campus?" & etc. So I assumed I would be just about the last in line.
Talking with other people, it appears to be pretty random. No one really has any idea why they have or haven't been given an appointment.
Last March I wouldn't have predicted there would be a vaccine at all just 1 year later, much less that I would be getting it. Yea Big Pharma.
"Remember when your defense mechanisms prevented you from realizing that it was obviously not going to be 2 or 4 or 6 weeks?"
This was pretty much exactly me. My friend was pregnant, and I remember reassuring her that by her due date in July, surely everything would be back to normal. I also remember having the niggling thought that there was no realistic path to a return to normalcy by summer, but I couldn't face the alternative possibility and I sure wasn't going to say it out loud to someone going through her first pregnancy.
In April my son asked me when I though it would be over, and I told him October, which was my way of informing him it would be bad for a long time without overwhelming him with the thought of 12-18 months of this shit.
47: You should have just told her to go for Irish twins because she's going to be stuck home regardless.
March 7 is when I went to a restaurant despite having a mild cough and sore throat, after my kid had just been out of school for a week with one of the worst colds he'd ever had, which was 10 days after we had traveled through an international hub airport in Central America. Fortunately I can blame the Boston breakout on Biogen.
A year ago I was giving an invited talk and having a wonderful time at a wine bar, where we collectively agreed that this coronavirus was something scary like the first SARS, but it would probably be just like a bad flu season. Some people were wearing masks on the flight home but they were the military surplus kind and I privately thought they looked ridiculous. The day after I got home, I was tired, but Pebbles begged to go skiing so we went up for a glorious bluebird day where we ran into the rest of her preschool skiing friends and feasted on cheesy fries. It was the last 'normal times' picture in my phone for a long time.
The following Monday, I rearranged the syllabus in one of my classes, moving the final project forward two weeks, 'just in case we have a closure before the end of the semester.' Students looked at me like I had grown another head. Later that week, the university announced the closure in between my two classes and the schools closed the following day. I have a picture of shiv drawing 'flattening the curve' for a very solemn Calabat. Two days after that I booked Pebbles' birthday party for early April -- we were only closing for two weeks, after all.... we moved it to August, and then canceled it.
Are Texas fire marshals enforcing those freedom-destroying room occupancy limits?
I was 90% "locked down" by mid-February with isolation, pantry stocked, etc. From there I waited for things to get better (they didn't) or worse (they did, but slowly at first). I remember at the end of January saying to my physical therapist at our final session that this was real and it was time to start planning on being confined for a month or two. I was thinking of being ready for a lockdown more like what China did. As it is, this has never felt like a lockdown. Just lots of isolation. Turns out, that's bad enough.
We had gone to a memorial service in a part of Germany that was seeing the first big burst of cases. Italy was having a terrible time by then. I was worried that travel restrictions would come into force while we were away, obviating the stocking up on supplies that I had been slowly doing in the preceding weeks.
We got back, the kids had one day of school to pack things up, and that was mostly that for the 2019-20 school year. I was back in the office from June to December.
Now I know someone who died of covid. Mid-February; the vaccine arrived too late to help him.
. I was thinking of being ready for a lockdown more like what China did. As it is, this has never felt like a lockdown.
I had this thought too, reading the old posts - we never had scheduled days where you were allowed to leave your house to get essentials, or drone deliveries, or radii from your house that you were allowed to exercise within, or anything like that.
I have just now FINALLY made an appointment for my 82-year-old father with breathing difficulties to get vaccinated. I am so relieved.
yay!!
So, teachers are now an endorsed group to get vaccinated. However, I have full prerogative to teach from home as much as I want. And given that the semester ends at the end of April, I probably wouldn't uproot everyone and force them to attend face to face for the last few weeks. (And I'm unwilling to let students choose to be F2F or remote, and teach both simultaneously.)
If I'm essentially remote (except for tests), I should just wait until vaccines are broadly available, yes? This is not the popular opinion among anyone I know.
56 Hooray!
I'm actually thinking of making plans to go back to NY for June and or July since I will be fully vaccinated by the end of April. I'm hoping enough of the NY commentariat will be vaccinated by then too so we could plan a meet-up, even if outdoors.
I was in a similar situation and have not been vaccinated. Are you as a college professor included in the teacher classification. I think the arguments about returning to in-person are different for young kids and uprooting them. Just think of all of the people in tens wealthy Florida Keys enclave who got early access and then wrote big checks to deSantis. Feel your anger, feel superior and wait.
Also, the scramble to chase the vaccines while there is a shortage is a LOT of work.
50. I visited Biogen in late January and when the Biogen meeting at the Marriott Long Wharf happened my first thought was "glad I wasn't invited to that." My last day working at the office was March 5th. I took my work laptop home with me that day and have been WFH ever since. The company locked down March 9th IIRC. I naively thought that the ensuing "really strict lockdown" might clear things up quickly. Not so much!
57. MA (Gov. Baker) moved teachers to the current list of "you can get vaccinated," which seems to vary at least every week.
57 Take the shot HG. It seems to that especially with Texas giving up on precautions, as a society, that your already a bit leaky bubble puts you still at some small risk of being a vector. You don't want to be a vector. You'll be so relieved, and you'll have modeled diligence in your communities.
As I understand it, the feds told states to prioritize teachers, dammit, so this is what that is.
59. BG, have you tried the "mass vaccination sites"? It's a huge slog to get to Gillette but they are said to open new appointments every Thursday, and although it is said you spend a lot of time standing in line they are also very efficient. Of course, now the state is letting more hospitals and mega-pharmacies vaccinate, so it's unclear where the shortages will be. The appointment system, though still an abomination that was developed by clowns, is getting somewhat better. (For those not in MA, there is a registry of places that have vaccines, and each of them can have their own system for actually getting an appointment. The kicker is that one has to enter all all of ones personal data (multiple text and buttons and pages) and only then do you discover there aren't any appointments available, because the individual sites and the state's site don't have real-time updates of how many appointments are actually available. So you do it all again on your next try. (They say they are adding the ability to enter your data and save it until you try again.)
I'm not throwing away my shot.
My wife and stepdaughter both have vaccination appointments.
My company had vaccine shots available and encouraged me to get one even though I meet zero of the criteria that should make me eligible. I protested somewhat and asked if it wouldn't make more sense for the shot to go to someone in a higher risk demographic. I was told that persons eligible for shots were selected for reasons of "business continuity" and that if I declined the shot it would go to the next person on the list, not necessarily (or even likely) someone in a higher-risk demographic. Condemn me to hell if you must--condemn me to hell!--but I agreed to take the shots.
I am genuinely grateful to be vaccinated, but I don't feel much real "relief"--no other members of my immediate family have been vaccinated, and (being in a relatively low-risk demographic) I didn't ever feel all that fearful for my personal safety anyway.
Actually, the federal directive doesn't cover higher ed, so moral crisis averted.
OK, minor rant. My vaccination appointment is this afternoon. Yesterday I got an email asking me to log into an account I don't have to get information on the appointment (what to bring & etc.) and saying that if I don't currently have an account set up, I would receive an email with a setup link in 2 business days.
So I spent most of this morning on hold at a hotline to sort things out. It's all taken care of and I'm now ready for the appointment, but the process feels emblematic of larger disfunction. I can understand putting up barriers to getting an appointment (limited supplies, priority & etc.), but what possible argument is there for making it difficult to get the necessary information for your appointment after it's been scheduled?
I feel like if you could really understand the thought process that led someone to think that this was a good idea, you would have some insight into why our healthcare system overall is as messed up as it is.
I think it's that the people who go to meetings with the vendors who sell and set up software systems have no overlap with the people who use the system. It's the same reason why say the software around graduate school applications is such a nightmare for everyone who uses it.
|| You may be wondering what the US Supreme Court did today. The yuzh -- broadened the grounds for withholding government documents from the public, narrowed the grounds that a non-citizen might argue for discretionary relief from deportation. |>
Baker explicitly pouted that the only reason he was authorizing teachers is because Biden was forcing him to by opening the federally controlled pharmacy eligibility to them, so Baker said he had to open the MA controlled sites to avoid confusion. Meanwhile he's trying to force all teachers to go back in person April 1, potentially including cutting funding from districts by not counting remote attendance towards state requirements. What an asshole.
MA sites will open to teachers on 3/11 but pharmacy sites opened immediately (effectively 5am this morning) and we quickly got an appointment at CVS for my wife on Monday. Hopefully that makes Charlie even sadder that some teachers will get their shots "early."
I am doing weekly testing on site at work and all negative so far, but every morning after the test I'm nervous checking the site.
What bothers me is that, while it was no big deal for me to spend a bunch of time navigating a maze of websites and then spending half the morning on the phone, I could easily imagine someone with a more hectic schedule getting discouraged enough to say "Screw it, I'll just reschedule".
It seems like this is the opposite of what you should do if you want as many people as possible to be getting vaccinated.
65: Now that they have returned supply to the hospital systems, I can schedule with my employer. My primary care clinic is an FQCH center and they have their own clinic too - in the church I got married in! I haven't, because I'm 100% remote. I could, but I'm uncomfortable with that. I check periodically out of curiosity, trying to put myself in the shoes of someone who isn't tech savvy.
I've been trying to figure out how to get my 74 year old mother scheduled in Maine, and it's hard. They registered with the hospital but have not heard back yet. Hannaford's and Walgreens have them but that requires navigation.
Some of my husbands coworkers were lying and saying that they were healthcare workers - laboratorians. I think he would be eligible before the general population, and he should get it, because he's on site. That said, they have great ventilation. The fact that bus drivers aren't all vaccinated enrages me. 136 MTA workers in New York died of COVID last year. Workers in meat packing plants should all be vaccinated. Maybe even before healthcare workers.
73: "What an asshole" is *so* right, but he is still hugely popular.
I love Maura Healey so much and wanted her in the Senate if Warren moved on and would love to see her as Governor, but there seems to be a curse against AGs winning higher office.
I love her not just because her policies are great but because her office is making my life easier.
Healey negotiated a settlement with PHEAA which does business as FedLoan which manages the PSLF program. The Dept of ED has. Been ineffectual, because there are Trump Devon holdovers in the FAFSA aid section, but the AGO settlement requires FedLoan provide them with a single point of contact for MA residents, and a very nice person took my release form and opened a case and will be trying to find out what is going on. That's on top of monetary damages for some people.
First shot done, the next in 3 weeks.
76. The last MA Atty. General to succeed in a run for Senate or Governor was Edward Brooke, back in 1966. No pressure, Maura!
Did he agree to shake hands in the cold outside Fenway Park?
I dunno, but he ran against Endicott Peabody, who had four MA towns named after him: Endicott, Peabody, Marblehead, and Athol.
Ha! I haven't seen that joke in many years. Good ole Chub.
I am getting my basement stream fixed tomorrow. Hopefully, this works and I can get the drywall redone next.
A year ago I was in the second or third week of daily senior management meetings which would start with our director reporting on the daily cabinet meeting he'd just left by throwing up his hands and saying, "We're getting no guidance." I think it was around this time that I finally stopped merely screaming inside and said, "We won't get any guidance until it's too late." We then started shutting down in various ways but always at least a half-measure too little: cease public programs, close to the general public but not the campus, encourage staff to work remotely if possible, finally on March 13 a complete shutdown. This was announced by gathering all staff in the building in a conference room at 9:30 am to tell them to go home until further notice, truly a meeting that could have been an email.
I've been back in the building pretty much every week for at least a bit since last June. Several days of the week are completely consumed by Zoom meetings, so it makes no sense to go in then, but at the end of the day, I work with stuff. There's no way to do my job without going in, being in spaces with people, moving objects, examining them. Just tonight I was in to oversee the unloading of a shipment. I'm hopeful that the pace of vaccinations have increased, but as someone who is likely to wait a while for a shot despite having health issues, it's worrisome. I'm an essential employee in what is considered a highly inessential industry. And meanwhile we keep collecting. I've been telling my curators, who mostly have worked remotely throughout the year: when you are deciding to acquire an object, ask yourself if it's worth someone's health.
ask yourself if it's worth someone's health
Pretty much always.
84: you are in regular violation of the collection management policy and are forbidden from acquiring anything. But the only thing I don't relate to about this gif is that you should always have two people moving objects:
https://images.app.goo.gl/wEMN1FMQ8ppVCFW39
The Ark already killed the first one.
The basement stream people are on the way. I know Los Angeles has had some regrets about putting rivers into pipes, but I think it is the right choice for my basement.
I was going to have a little channel in the floor that went out the garage so that I would also have a Roman-style bathroom in the basement, but they refused to do that.
Even after I promised not to poop in it.
I guess I can't bottle it as spring water because it probably comes from the old coal mine.
MAGA water. Guaranteed FDA non-compliant.
23: Thanks, ydnew.
The crew said they needed to get a bigger pump but they didn't say it like the "We're going to need a bigger boat" line in Jaws.
Last March, my wife went to her trade show Mar 9 to 12; during this week of last year she was working with the board because some of the big sponsors were pulling out of the show on only a few day's notice. The event went okay, but there were a few sketchy things that raised eyes (like a keynote speaker blowing up a balloon on stage then releasing it --open, not tied-- to fly around the room and crash down at random) that they had to disavow.
Once she was home, the next week was full of state mandates changing every day; I think it was the 18th when she had the staff meeting where she fired everyone so they'd be eligible for enhanced unemployment... and because the store was going to be closed indefinitely.