On the other hand, the variants could get worse and worse and then just before everyone dies, they would be forced to acknowledge we were right

The best way to get acknowledged as being right is to put horse de-worming medication in every gas station with a big sign reading "Nancy Pelosi and Brandon don't want you to take this as treatment for covid."

Some of the latest quack treatments for Covid include drinking your own urine, and taking a strong, continued dose of androgen blockers. Let them win, I guess?

The urine is just going to waste anyway.

OTOH, at least some of us will remember these free-rider traitors for the rest of our lives. I know that when/if we can ever mix freely in public, I'll be wearing t-shirts expressing my sentiments about these scum, just as I used to wear anti-TFG ("Truck Fump!" and others) t-shirts back in the day.

Certainly people who lost loved ones to this bug are gonna remember for a long, long time.

should have added: it has become and will remain a litmus test: "when did you get vaccinated?" just like "did you vote for Dems in 2018/2020?"

So, the thing is in order to be able to enact policies, we need a non-trivial subset of those people to either stay home or vote Democrat based on other reasons.

Anyway, I recommend not grilling people about their past views if they seem to be willing to vote right in 2022. Winning 2021 is useless now.

So how do we neutralize Fox news?

2?

So, the thing is in order to be able to enact policies, we need a non-trivial subset of those people to either stay home or vote Democrat based on other reasons.

Only if you think anti-vaxxers are, like, 50% of the population. I think its closer to 25%, and its fine to say fuck them all because they were never going to vote democratic anyway.

I don't think that's true. For one thing, Biden won Pennsylvania but a year later, a referendum passes taking away the governor's public health power. Pennsylvania is full of assholes who will either stay home (more likely) or cross party lines depending on what's at stake in the election and what the issues are. And by "full of", I don't mean this is a large percentage of the population. Just that there's no way to write them off as irrelevant.

Moby @ 8: the grilling isn't so I can yell at them; it's to decide whether or not I will have social relations with them. I wouldn't have social relations with an ex-Nazi either, unless he'd (1) fully admitted his sins, (2) atoned for them, (3) was willing to *discuss* his atonement in detail to convince those among the class of his victims.

Someone who splits tickets, goes back-and-forth between Dems and GrOPers, isn't an ally, and I sure AF don't count them as fellow citizens worth of my concern or regard.

Social life is one thing, but winning elections requires just those people.

Moby @ 14: sure, and I don't begrudge other people being willing to reach out to those subhuman wretches. "All Subhuman Lives Matter!" sure/sure/sure. I'm not gonna subject myself to that sort of thing, and that is how I interpreted the OP: "how do we deal with the imbeciles who put us in this situation and are prolonging it with their selfish free-riding and bug-spreading, as eventually our behaviour starts to resemble theirs, bit-by-bit?"

Some sins don't get forgiven.

I guess my point to the OP is that the situation described is infuriating but it's also almost a best case scenario.

I know.

I'm an optimist at heart.

1, 16:. Comity!

Well, ultimately it was Biden who made the decision to let 'er rip with Omicron, so if swing voters don't go for that its not because our side isn't sufficiently goulish enough.

As a satisfied customer of the androgen blockers, I would like to welcome the Covid fringe to my world of sore boobs, undermotivated weeping, enhanced appreciation of hot guys in films and profound, near-existential pickle cravings. They will notice a halt to any male-pattern baldness in progress, reduce their risk of prostate cancer and lose interest in Pornhub. It has to be better for them than the dewormer was.

Since this is the COVID thread, Mass General Brigham announced Friday they're delaying nearly 40% of surgeries. Tumors slated for removal are being triaged by size and rate of growth. They're hoping to resume normal treatment schedules in February.

And on Thursday, UMass Memorial Medical Center, the largest health system in Central Massachusetts, suspended all surgeries and medical procedures for conditions not considered life-threatening until further notice

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2022/01/14/metro/hospitals-postponing-thousands-surgeries-amid-onslaught-covid-other-patients/

I really thought we'd be past the peak-and-trough stage by now.

I thought Boston was pooping less covid? I guess there's a lag between that and the drop in hospitalizations.

21: Rogaine did none of that for me.

I guess I don't have the "pattern".

Well, our family is officially doing its part to make omicron endemic. Kraabniece #3 (13 y.o.) has a mild case. Out of the eleven people I count as immediate family, she's the first one, which is a pretty decent run.

23: Looks like cases in Mass. peaked about a week ago, but hospitalizations haven't yet.

Smug "I was rightism" comes up in a lot of complicated situations with no clear course of action; one of the things i most assuredly do not miss from my work days. In this case it is much more infuriating (and serious of course). Ron Desantis is going to win the pandemic again!

And with pandemic (and governance in general) it is once again show that it is nearly impossible to "win" if a significant powerful opposition is dedicated to only shooting you up the ass. (And in particular if the discourse generally elides the fact that that is the opposition's strategy). This all was going to be very hard no matter what. Many missteps no matter what.

It's fucking drear all the way down.

For instance in all the various major media reports I cannot recall one straight news story that even fucking referenced Fox News role in militantly attacking vaccinations. It should be one of the top fucking stories of the past year and it almost nevereven gets mentioned. The anti-vax diner people just got there via their own research.

20: Well, ultimately it was Biden who made the decision to let 'er rip with Omicron, so if swing voters don't go for that its not because our side isn't sufficiently goulish enough.

Not sure I know what this is referring to but I judge it to be fuckwittery of a high degree.

All I'm saying is that Jeff Zient's boss has a lot to answer for.

Yes. Zient has been pretty bad.

Anti-vax is not as bad as ex-Nazi in my book, just saying.

There is some overlap

34: Not sure I agree, but I'm willing to go with: ex-anti-vax is not as bad as ex-Nazi.

Has everyone ordered their four free rapid tests yet?

I was expecting a healthcare.gov level clusterfuck, but no, it seems to be simple and easy to get your confirmation. I guess the question is if they actually come, and when.

I just ordered the four tests, which I more than I need, but my plan is to leave some of them in the charity box downtown.

Running it through the USPS seems like a smart move logistically.

I got a bunch of rapid tests through my work a couple weeks ago, so I'm not going to order any through this. But I like the approach.

Spike @ 20: I really want, really want, really *want* to find a way to argue against you. But the best I can do is:

Yes, they were incompetent, but still, better than TFG, yeah? Which isn't saying much, but hey, it's something.

I'm frustrated and angry that the Admin allowed tests to fall into short supply: it speaks to a belief that "hey, we're all done, right?" when the mantra of public health is "unless you're accused of overdoing it, you didn't do enough". Arrrgh. And yeah: you're right. Our, *our* elected officials aren't supposed to sacrifice copious quantities of American lives, in search of political advantage. Or money.

gah, that was me @ 41.

Weirdly enough, I tend to compare things to other things that exist or were likely to exist. Public health is often subordinate to political and practical concerns (e.g. cigarettes and booze are cheap and widely available). The question is always trade-offs to secure a coalition that can win.

Moby: I'm not saying I like where Spike has (rightly) dragged me. But (for instance) European governments did better, and they aren't by any means the best (outliers) so it's fair to compare ourselves. And sure, public health is subordinate to political/practical concerns, so sure, I guess I sort of understand the "shorten isolation from 10 to 5 days". But it could have been done in a manner that didn't allow hospitals to *literally* force nurses to come back to work while still infectious with covid -- I mean, that was a *mistake*. And "allowing testing capacity to fall down" when we didn't *know* the pandemic was over? That's a massive mistake. I have friends who visited Europe, and just because they knew what a shitstorm it was here, they returned with scads of tests that they'd gotten for a song in Europe.

None of this is comparing ourselves to New Zealand and Australia, not to mention South Korea and Japan.

It's disappointing.

I don't know why, but we have had no real problems getting tests. Maybe no one here is testing because they aren't going to do anything different if they get covid? Had to go into a Walmart for the first time in a decade, but it wasn't much effort.

In SFBay area, everybody I know is trying to ration out their tests, so they'll have enough in case of an unfortunate exposure. I have an unopened kit, and have offered it to all my relatives who are more numerous in their households. And of course, AFAICT (not gonna go into stores, so going off their websites) no tests to be had for purchase.

Another failure: it was known as early as early summer, that with Delta we would need to switch to N95 masks. But the CDC announced "gosh, if you can, use an N95" only a few days ago? What's up with that? C'mon Dr. Walensky, you can do better than that.

I'm with 1. Actually, I'm thinking of Victorian novels with rife tuberculosis and thinking about how perpetual COVID-as-it-is-now would change life. What I mostly come up with is, if every year each of us has a, oh, one in forty chance of getting long COVID that makes you not regularly employable,

a) Labor dearth! That could be politically pretty nice, actually, FOR THE HEALTHY.

b) The pattern of increasing education length as a holding pattern for labor, from high school in the Great Depression to generalized master's degrees now, reverses.

c) Instead, big motives to work as hard as you can as early as you can, to make your nut before the dice roll bad.

If the workforce gets younger, how many decisions are going to be made by younger people? Or do we go for an even skinnier age-pyramid with all the decisions made by lucky/cautious older people? How do we rearrange schooling, since we probably do need more than the Victorians did to maintain the infrastructure we would like to keep?

Man, it just turns into a William Gibson novel, and "the Jackpot" is a great and terrible idea.

The workforce kind of has to get younger regardless.

Pittsburgh feels less like an open-air geriatric ward that it did when I came here, so maybe I'm overly keyed in to generational replacement.

Spoke too soon, it seems like a lot of people in apartments got thwarted, the system saying someone had already signed up from that address. However, it worked fine for me and at least one other person in my building, so I suspect the issues were more where apartment numbers had changed or been added or were otherwise not fully known to USPS.

New software is going to have bugs. Maybe they could have spent 10 more weeks testing their system, but that's 10 more weeks we would have to wait for covid tests. It will get fixed.

I'm not saying I like where Spike has (rightly) dragged me.

For the record, I don't like it either.

None of this is comparing ourselves to New Zealand and Australia, not to mention South Korea and Japan.

I think that an extremely fair point of comparison is Canada, which is currently running at 901 active cases per 100,000, as compared to 7,493 cases per 100,000 in the US.

clew: I think it was Brad Delong who said that you can't run an even remotely-modern economy in the middle of a pandemic -- the mixing required to run such an economy, the *trust* required to run such an economy, breaks down when every interaction could kill or cripple you. If any such new stream of ever-worse variants came along (as transmissible as omicron, as deadly-or-worse as Delta, evading vaccines), I think we could fully-expect that the government would pretty quickly have to skip past more and more provisions of the FDA Act to get untested vaccines into the arms of the public -- running massive public trials, in short, b/c the effects of repeated infection with 1% CFR would be catastrophic otherwise.

That we can afford the *luxury* of months-long clinical trials and then months-long review processes including in-depth investigation of manufacturing processes, is all down to the fact that these diseases aren't particularly deadly, and immunity lasts a while. [ugh, I know, I know, I know, "aren't particularly deadly" .....]

53: Canada has single-payer healthcare and more social cohesion than the United States by I don't know how many orders of magnitude. All the orders of magnitude? I mean, Canada's social fabric is more frayed at the moment than it's been since struggles over the future of Quebec divided the national government. But even still, compared to the United States? Pshaw. Canada may as well be New Zealand or Australia. Just to be clear, I'm not trying to shill for the United States by saying that the comparison isn't even remotely fair.

I think 47 underestimates how much of the working age population is already long term unemployable due to chronic illness. Long COVID is just another one to add to the list.

And of course it wouldnt be one on forty chance every year. Your odds would worsen as you aged - and a lot of the people who got long covid would be already unemployable due to other illnesses.

re:47

A pilot program, first proposed by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) in 2020, would allow drivers aged 18 to 20 to operate commercial motor vehicles in interstate commerce after completing probationary hours.

Since I complained about the lack of calling out Fox News in 30, I feel compelled to link this Brianna Kelly clip where she takes them on head on. It is not specifically about Covid and vaxes but at least it is a direct discussion of their role as the "mothership" of disinformation.

54: I think the FDA made a tough call requiring additional efficacy trials for the first variant-targeting vaccines, but. given the novelty of the mRNA approach combined with data showing continued efficacy against severe illness and death, it wasn't a bad call. Remember, the folks who are unvaccinated now aren't going to rush out for a variant vaccine, so I'm not sure about the added benefits to rushing approvals at this point. I expect after a round or two showing the variant targeting vaccines work as expected (and the manufacturing process isn't changing), they'll move to a different model for approvals.

I don't agree with the case for rushing new vaccines. The problem isn't that we don't have good vaccines and approving one that later is shown to cause some problem would have very negative effects overall.

59: And the WaPo just now in an article centered around the Covide death of one man in a small town in Michigan.

Unlike Janice {his wife--JPS], who was fully vaccinated and boosted, Danny had refused to get the shot, something his wife attributes to a long-standing distrust in government and a heavy diet of Fox News.

The WaPo story that gets me is this one, about the (private) health care company with a contract to an Arkansas jail that fed Covid sick prisoners ivermectin.

I'm not trying to shill for the United States by saying that the comparison isn't even remotely fair.

Canada is literally another settler society with British roots, on our same continent and sharing with us a massive border. Sure, one reason they are doing better than us is because, on average, people there aren't as shitty as we are, but that hardly makes the comparison unfair.

What Canada's experience tells us is that better performance against covid is absolutely possible when mitigation strategies are adopted. Meanwhile, many of these strategies have been explicitly rejected by the Biden Administration and aren't even being implemented in blue states.

All in all, I think Canada/USA comparison is a pretty good case study in what happens when a country takes a pandemic seriously vs. fucking around and finding out.

I think basically all of these comparisons are worthless, unless done carefully. Sweden is a country that fucked around, and found out that it had a death rate of 1,500 per million, while Belgium pursued lockdowns and still had a death rate of 2,500 per million, close to the US. The evidence that vaccines make a difference is (unsurprisingly) very strong, but everything else it's much less clear.

In Quebec you can't buy weed without a vaccine passport. That's how its done.

Belgium pursued lockdowns and still had a death rate of 2,500 per million

Belgium was one of the most aggressive "lets get schools open" countries, and really only pursued "lockdowns" when covid cases skyrocketed as a result.

66 was me

I should try to move to Canada.

You should try to make more of the assholes leave this country.

Canada doesn't only have British roots!

Also, they didn't have plantation slavery, which accounts for a whole lot of difference, particularly in the health field.

Caveat: IANAH!

WRT US health messaging, I think it's worth keeping in mind that they're not trying to talk to me, or pretty much any of us, but to get people who are much less receptive to the kinds of messages we might heed to come in off the ledge. I'm not saying they've been perfect, but I don't think one can say that (a) it is easy or (b) they haven't been trying.

There was never a vaccination clinic at my son's school, or any of the other schools in our area. That's not a messaging failure.

Pittsburgh feels less like an open-air geriatric ward that it did when I came here

I keep telling people who are unhappy that they didn't arrive in Seattle at the start of the boom that I think Pittsburgh now is Seattle then. It's my fault!

We are having a bit of a third stage to this lumpy demographic shift -- the housing/neighborhoods designed for 20somethings right out of CS school are kind of annoying to the 30somethings they've turned into. (E.g. clubs on streetlevel with new housing highrises, no sound-locks, and no culture of "be quiet once you've come out".)

People talk about west coast transplants, but I think it's mostly kids from the exurbs and rural PA unwilling to move home after college.

If we rushed vaccines and treatments we'd get even more of them wrong and make people sick differently, which would just be a different way to get to unemployable-early, yes?

One of the nerdy ideas I rather liked, from before we knew if we'd get a vaccine at all, was that we could manage mixing/not mixing by organizing in clades -- eg at pandemic level worst you only expose yourself to your household, at worst-1 each household can choose exactly 1 other household to merge with, at worst-2 those pairs merge into fours, up and down.

Although the practical version I liked most was that the joins and splits matched the mergings of sewer connections, for those of us on one, since those map indoors mingling pretty well. AND we could monitor sewage outflow for disease markers and walk up the tree to find hotspots.

Would still be an enormous hassle -- and as was immediately pointed out, there are a lot of secret second families and secret second jobs impelling people to cheat. Cheat extra, that is.

I should just write a sf story using this. The Stainless Steel Rat Sniffs Out Side-jobs.

My house hasn't even doubled in value over 20 years. It's a very sedate shift.

74: Yeah, that's how it starts. The local kids don't geddoutatown, and they move into the old housing stock and start businesses that stay open after 6pm, and maybe there's an art fair and then there's a magazine article and a cheap movie (set in Vancouver) and then OUTSIDERS move in and it's RUINED.

That's Lawrenceville, where we go to get a $30 pizza if we want a treat.

I'll remember that if I ever visit my aunt in Sarver again. (Her kids both determinedly moved out to even smaller towns. Occasionally we mention real estate prices to each other and manage to all parties feel like we're doing okay -- Seattle has bank value but PA has ACRES of HARDWOODS with year-round streams.)

Filmed in Vancouver, set in Philly, jeez.

Canada doesn't only have British roots!

Also, they didn't have plantation slavery, which accounts for a whole lot of difference, particularly in the health field.

I was recently reminded of this claim by John Ralston Saul, which I feel unequipped to evaluate:

We [in Canada] believe the roots for what we do come from Europe and, increasingly, the United States. Actually we're much less European than the U.S., which is structured completely out of the Enlightenment and European 19th-century ideas. And we are really the product of the first 250 years of our 400 years as a civilization, the product of experiences between newcomers and Aboriginals, when Aboriginals were either the dominant or equal players, depending on where you were in the country. We are a blend of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal, but the driving ideas underneath are the Aboriginal ones.

I don't really buy that claim, but that's an interesting interview.

Canada shares car dependence and detached-suburb culture to almost the same degree, though; a big thing bringing it closer to American and further from European ways of life.

(Obviously Europe has plenty of issues with car culture, but they never went as far as NA did, and started deliberately moving away from it much earlier.)

75: Here in Oz we were doing lockdowns last year, including no travel between different parts of the city without a good reason. If you were dating someone and registered that fact with the state health department, that was a good enough reason.
It was funny and awkward and hopefully good for single people who otherwise weren't seeing anyone for weeks/months on end.

Spike: "All in all, I think Canada/USA comparison is a pretty good case study"

Heh, after all, if you rule out all the countries that did a good job, you can't exactly then find that the US is a laggard, right? Spot-on, spot-on.

72 I don't think we've been doing it at schools either. As noted last spring, I got my shot at the county fairgrounds, administered by a firefighter.

Maybe the CDC should encourage school systems to set up vaccine clinics. https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/covid-19/planning/school-located-clinics/how-schools-can-support.html

72/87: We had vaccine drives at schools. And pissed off parents who felt it was inappropriate. I hate people.

It's only a small step from that to teaching the kids evolution or the reason the Civil War was fought.

ydnew: it's insane: those parents, or their parents, lined up for the polio vaxx at school, like I did in mid-70s Delaware. Just insane.

They did some of the first tests of that at a school in Lawrenceville.

Man, I sure as shit hope the federal government can put together a coordinated, nation-wide, boosters-in-schools program at the beginning of next school year.

We had vaccine drives at schools. And pissed off parents who felt it was inappropriate

We've been trying to do vaccinations at schools as well, but in a lot of schools the teachers are refusing, because a) they think that it's disruptive to teaching to take kids out of class for a vaccination and b) they are afraid of being targeted by antivax protesters.

As noted last spring, I got my shot at the county fairgrounds, administered by a firefighter.

I know this makes sense in the US because firefighters are also paramedics, but I just can't help assuming that this was some kind of mass vaccination delivered by firehose, rather like the 1920s Chinese warlord General Ma converting to Christianity, parading his troops, rolling out a fire engine and baptising them en masse.

Now I'm visualizing what will happen if the latest antivaxxer treatment of urine becomes popular.

We had vaccine drives at schools.

We've always bathrooms at schools.

We've had vaccine drives at four of the seven elementary schools in town, in November and December, and we're only up to 64% of the 5-11 age kids with a shot. Next door in Arlington they basically hit 100%.

Spike: "All in all, I think Canada/USA comparison is a pretty good case study"

Heh, after all, if you rule out all the countries that did a good job, you can't exactly then find that the US is a laggard, right? Spot-on, spot-on.

Mulling this over last night my thoughts are:

Of course the US has messed up in various ways, and there's plenty of deserved criticism. Canada is an obvious comparison of a country that's done much better. The fact that most of the Western European countries have similar outcomes to the US (and that the differences in outcomes are driven more by differences in vaccination rate than any other government policy) suggests that it isn't simple to do as well as Canada has. I'm sure that there's an element of path dependency, but I wonder where you start the path, and what is involved in getting on a better path if you don't start out doing well. My Canadian co-worker thinks the experience with SARS in 2003 was a useful learning experience (for example, googling I find a SARS commission report (PDF). Even if you don't go back that far, I genuinely don't know whether it would be possible for the US in January 2021 to say, "we want to be Canada going forward" or whether there was a bunch of groundwork that had already been done, which allowed Canada to do as well with the Delta wave as they had with the original waves that would have been difficult to replicate in the US.

It would be good to know; I'm not dismissing the question, just not sure how to answer it.

98: They had 2 Clinics on different Saturdays that were held at the high school using both school nurses and town nurses. They ran the clinic all day so that people who worked shifts could go. I believe that they contacted parents not just by e-mail but with flyers. I believe that the town I'm moving to was similarly successful.