As ‘Sophisticated and Vaccinated’ Catch COVID, Media Dials Down Panic Level
The preference cascade, even among the media, is toward dropping the failed policies and resuming a normal life with a few extra bouts of ‘cold’ courtesy of China.
I’m so old that I remember when a New York Times reporter said Barack Obama’s birthday party last August was a COVID-safe event because of the ‘sophisticated, vaccinated crowd‘ that attended.
A clip of Annie Karni, a White House correspondent for the New York Times speaking on CNN quickly spread on social media with critics berating her for justifying the party using such terms.
Quoting people from her own story, Karni said that residents on the island of Martha’s Vineyard where the party was being held had given her various reasons as to why COVID concerns were low.
‘This has really been overblown, they’re following all the safety precautions, people are going to sporting events that are bigger than this, this is going to be safe, this is a sophisticated, vaccinated crowd and this is just about optics it’s not about safety,’ Karni stated.
Since then, several notable progressive politicians and celebrities have come down with COVID, despite their ‘sophistication.’ The list now includes Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Whoopie Goldberg (both have the vaccination and booster and a media-approved level of refinement).
Furthermore, after a summer of mocking Southern states for their coronavirus surges, the Blue states are seeing high levels of new cases. The caseload is such in Rhode Island that its governor has called in the National Guard to assist one hospital.
In what he described as “a targeted and strategic” effort to relieve COVID-related pressures on hospitals, Gov. Dan McKee on Wednesday outlined new measures including encouraging recent graduates of nursing schools to work under temporary licenses and sending about 60 National Guard troops to Butler Hospital.
Those troops will assist with care of certain patients at the psychiatric center, freeing up Butler staff to attend to other patients.
Rhode Island joins California, Arkansas, Ohio, New Jersey, Maryland, Delaware, and Massachusetts in using the National Guard to deal with the staffing issues and testing protocol.
Suddenly, more and more Americans recognize that COVID is here to stay, everyone is likely to become infected, and being ill from SARS-Cov-2 should not be treated as MAGA-hick pariahs. And more people are questioning the wisdom of continuing pandemic response policies that no longer work.
In this context, there have been some fascinating news articles. CNBC reported growing calls in Europe for Covid-19 to be treated as an endemic illness like the flu.
Spain’s prime minister, Pedro Sanchez, is the latest European leader to stick his head above the parapet by suggesting it’s time to reevaluate Covid. He called on the EU to debate the possibility of treating the virus as an endemic illness.
“The situation is not what we faced a year ago,” Sanchez said in a radio interview with Spain’s Cadena SER on Monday, as Spanish schoolchildren returned to their classrooms after the holidays.
“I think we have to evaluate the evolution of Covid to an endemic illness, from the pandemic we have faced up until now,” he added. Sanchez said it was time to open the debate around a gradual reappraisal of the pandemic “at the technical level and at the level of health professionals, but also at the European level.”
Next comes the acknowledgment in a Reuters piece that the spike hospitalizations are due to the Delta variant rather than the likely milder Omicron.
Hospitalizations have been on the rise since late December as Omicron surpassed the Delta variant as the dominant version of the coronavirus in the United States, although experts say Omicron will likely prove less deadly than prior iterations.
The recent increase in COVID deaths is likely a lagging effect of the Delta variant, which was surging before Omicron took hold in the United States in December, Walensky said.
With Delta and other prior variants, deaths have lagged infection rates by a few weeks.
The UK’s Telegraph published a study showing coronavirus loses 90 percent of its infectiousness within five minutes of becoming airborne.
Preliminary data from the University of Bristol reveals that in a real world situation the conditions of the air dry out the viral particles.
The team measured how stable SARS-CoV-2 droplets – the virus which causes Covid – are over time, ranging from five seconds to 20 minutes.
To round out today’s COVID news, the AP reports that many American health authorities are now allowing nurses and other workers infected with the coronavirus to stay on the job if they have mild symptoms or none at all. The move is even being made in deep-blue California.
The move is a reaction to the severe hospital staffing shortages and crushing caseloads that the omicron variant is causing.
California health authorities announced over the weekend that hospital staff members who test positive but are symptom-free can continue working. Some hospitals in Rhode Island and Arizona have likewise told employees they can stay on the job if they have no symptoms or just mild ones.
It is clear that the preference cascade, even among the “sophisticated and vaccinated” in the media, is toward dropping the failed policies and resuming an everyday life with a few extra bouts of ‘cold’ courtesy of China.
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Fire the nurses who refuse the “vax” so you have a staff shortage. Let people actively infected with covid treat patients when it was too risky for the other nurses to treat them.
How in the world do people try to pretend this makes sense?
Heard 3rd hand (daughter of a friend) that local hospital staffing shortage was so severe, the Hospital was prescribing Ivermectin for nurses and doctors, while continuing to withhold it from patients.
That would fit the Democrat model for hypocrisy.
My school is out today because of the quarantine rules. Oddly, only one unvax teacher was out – his kid is sick. We have been scrambling all year because these damn vax teachers can’t show up to work. We have had between 25% and 33% of teachers out every single day.
The media are still hyperventilating about the evil, unwashed non-vaxxed, though. Hopefully the SC stay will put a cork in that crap.
This summer when cases spiked in Red States, Washington and the Blue States just condescendingly said, “Those Deplorable Cretins just won’t get vaccinated and won’t isolate. We are doing so much better.”
Now that cases are spiking in Blue States they are saying, “If it is hitting us that hard, it must be unstoppable.”
This crisis is no longer working to improve the odds of Democrats being elected. It therefor must end.
Which leads into the question: what will be the next crisis? The US thrives on them.
Food distribution and empty store shelves will be the next Crisis.
Since, it should improve on it’s own as the Omicron cases come down. So, Democrats can finally take credit for some kind of improvement. Even if they did not actually fix it.
No, I’m in a false crisis. Like back in the late 50s with cranberries cause cancer.
Is that cranberry thing for real? That actually happened?
Yes, it happened. Late ’50s, just like he said. Screwed the Cape Cod area economy for a couple years. I don’t believe it was the berries, but some chemical they used on the crop.
Did you see retail sales report this morning? Our next crisis could be the one that really puts Biden and the Dems underwater: Recession.
Economies simply can’t sustain growth in the face of near double-digit inflation.
The Dems seem to have thought that they could exploit the COVID crisis for political gain indefinitely. But they’ve shot themselves in the foot on that. Will they do better by exploiting another manufactured crisis? Will their own true believers take that bait? I doubt it. Although that won’t stop them.
There’s this scene in “A Beautiful Mind” (I think) where a friend or colleague of the protagonist (a highly-respected mathematical genius) accompanies him into his own house, and is confronted with a nightmare of clutter, and walls covered with clippings, marker, and strands-of-yarn links… and it suddenly dawns on the friend that despite our hero’s genius, he is madder than a hatter, beyond redemption.
We’re replaying this same scene, and the protagonist is the group of “leading thinkers” in the Democratic Party. We’re finally getting to see what’s on their walls, because they’re under the misimpression that we’d be perfectly OK with it.
“I’m so old that I remember when a New York Times reporter said Barack Obama’s birthday party last August was a COVID-safe.”
You’re pretty old because anything about Obama is ancient history—almost mythical.
Everything about Obama was mythical, including his origin story. But mostly the operative myth was that of the Magic Negro: “The character often has no past but simply appears one day to help the white protagonist. They usually have some sort of magical power, “rather vaguely defined but not the sort of thing one typically encounters.” The character is patient and wise, often dispensing various words of wisdom, and is “closer to the earth”.
The end of Covid mania is close. The d/prog can’t simultaneously exploit Covid as a weapon for political gain and not injure themselves in the process. Attempting to appease the risk averse Covid Karens isn’t sustainable. See the d/prog shift in stance v teacher unions refusing to come to class.
Biden is in office, d/prog hold a bare majority in HoR and a split Senate. Sucks to be them. They deliberately chose policies that extended the damage to schools and the economy. Now they have an election in Nov to worry about. DJT isn’t available as the punching bag. Combined with CRT/Equity and labeling those who dissent from the Admin as subversive they have dug one heck of a hole.
There will always be a segment of the population who will live in fear of WuFlu and behave accordingly (stay at home for the most part, get every booster, wear masks when out in public, etc). They will also be the same people who think that Florida messed things up royally and the unvaxxed are to blame for CD-19 not going away.
On a different site in which I participate there was a discussion about people deciding to revert back to staying at home because of Omicron and I pointed out what was mentioned above: That CD-19 is endemic, it’s doing what viruses do in its mutations, and it’s not going away, ever. For some, you’d think I had spoken heresy.
Replying to myself, I said that it was joining the cold and flu club as something that will always be with us, and someone responded that it’ll be part of the cold and flu club only for the vaccinated.
Yes. There is no pandemic at this point COVID is endemic. It here, get used to it as they used to say.
I’m thankful that my morning coffee was consumed before I read the line “Sophisticated and vaccinated” above AOC’s photo. This avioded spewing my morning beverage upon my ‘putor!
I am grateful you saw what I did there. Gallows humor is my thing.
The original covid 19 was a glorified flu with a 99.95% non fatality rate.
The new mutations are a mere cold.
The vile Dhimmi-crats’ transparently politically-motivated, self-serving and totalitarian Wuhan virus histrionics and fear-mongering evolve, as the Wuhan virus’s political usefulness begins to ebb and wane.
This is an implicit admission that there’s no such thing as asymptomatic sickness and that the tests have too many false positives. It also creates the bizarre situation that a vaccinated but positive nurse can work, but an unvaccinated and negative nurse can’t.
I’m seeing a 20 something black chick who is willing to go to the Valdez Fly in with me next year. In Alaska.
https://www.travelalaska.com/Destinations/Communities/Valdez.aspx?utm_campaign=fy22&utm_medium=ppc&utm_source=bing&utm_content=2203&msclkid=3dd6b0cc88c01e50b99ad12f4ae3aaa2
I seem to have broken through some cultural barriers. Or, is there nothing Covid can’t do.
Wish me well at the fly in.,