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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