Covid’s basically endemic now, rather than pandemic. Still an unhappy situation to be in, but there it is. Many still are dying and will die of it.
Time travel back
If anyone was mistakenly thinking covid was only hitting the old…this is a wake up call.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6mw3Ev1CIt0 &1
Very cinema verite
From Your Local Epidemiologist’s email today:
We’re in the middle of a Covid-19 wave, with all indicators—from wastewater to hospitalizations and deaths—climbing. The pace isn’t as fast as last winter’s surge and levels remain below last summer’s wave, but the trend is clear. Wastewater data show “moderate” Covid activity in the West and South and “low” levels in the Northeast and Midwest, though rates are rising everywhere.
Other viruses remain quiet for now. But with schools reopening and temperatures cooling, RSV typically starts climbing in September, followed by flu. Current levels are very low.
What this means for you: If you want to avoid getting sick and/or missing back-to-school events and weddings, it’s time to mask in crowded indoor areas. I started while traveling because I just don’t have the time to get sick.
Sadly for those who are worried about increasing rates of Covid Exposure, the reality is that it’s being not only treated as endemic, but a lower risk than the normal flu recommendations. I was hoping to get another shot this year (even if it isn’t updated) but after checking with my health care provider, it wasn’t considered “preventative” any more. So, yeah, annual DED applies, then 80/20 coverage.
Thankfully I’ve had annual shots every year through 2024, and one case that was fully developed/expressed. I really wanted another shot, since in 4 weeks I’m visiting my 80+ year old parents, and I worry a lot more about me bringing them something than my own risks.
We still understand very little about long covid. I’m not comfortable evaluating the severity of it until we have a better handle on that part.
Just about every casual analysis I hear from friends and acquaintances seems to suffer from the same fault: We forget that we were responding to it in real time.
We may now (very recently) have enough data and hindsight to decide whether we should or should not have closed schools, or whatnot. Remember, we didn’t know a whole lot about COVID in the midst of the pandemic. We were making those decisions based on what we knew at the time, which wasn’t much.
I’m certainly open to a modern day de-briefing in which we determine we made some poor decisions. But I haven’t forgotten that, at the time, we had a lot of leaders working with very little information. Some of those leaders (Trump) had some very stupid ideas inspired by not much more than ideology, and some were merely poor, but honest ideas that turned out to be wrong.
If you compare the outcomes from say Australia with Canada.
Australia did far better with strong measures to track and isolate early on even tho vaccines were slow to arrive.
I recall a couple turned away from a high end eatery as no vaccine info and you had to register where ever you ate. No registration, no service.
Deaths:
24,414 - Australia 27 mil pop. .00090
60,871 as of September 21, 2024. Canada 40 mil pop .0015
1,219,487 USA with 240 mil pop .0036
When I arrived in January 2021 in Queensland, pop 5.4 million, there were only 7 deaths, no masks and people going about as if there was no pandemic as the borders were closed to other states and strongly enforced.
Only when the later more infectious but less fatal variations arrive did the numbers jump.
I think only New Zealand did better per capita in low deaths.
Over the entire pandemic, Australia has one of the lowest death rates in the OECD – 439 deaths per million, the United States’s is 3,050 deaths per million and the United Kingdom 2,718.
New Zealand has seen fewer deaths than Australia – 378 per million
I and partner have never had covid tho those close to us tho not in the household have. I want to keep it that way as long covid scares me ( 77 and a few health issues making me vulnerable ). We are up for our booster this week.
Even for older kids, it was pretty bad. For example:
What does a decline of 8 points in the NAEP math test mean? In math, one SD of individual student scores is about 40 points and is roughly equivalent, as a rule of thumb, to three years of schooling. The national average loss of 8 points is equivalent to 0.2 SD, which implies 0.6 years of schooling lost.
I suspect you’re right that upper-middle class students did better. More resources, probably better family support, etc. Which means things were even worse for the less-well-off students. Many likely lost a full year of education.
And a lot of leaders ignoring what information they had. In March of 2020, the Ohio department of health recommended that if there was a case found in a school, that that specific school close for two weeks. At the time, there were a total of five cases known in Ohio. And the response was to close all of the schools in the state.
Well, academically they may have done fine. Socially and emotionally, I bet they still had a hard time. My daughter is now in high school and I can see how hard it would be on her if she didn’t have the in-person social aspect of school, or the social outlet of summer camps where she gets to be around more kids like herself. She also has access to a lot of online socialization, but it’s really not the same. My teacher friend said that he noticed his high school kids, particularly the girls, went sky-high in anxiety when they came back after lockdown.
My younger one was in kindergarten, and we had a good situation in that he had an in-person “pod” of about 10 kids. But he still had a hard time after lockdown for a while with anything that involved kids who weren’t the pod kids.
The closest I was to anyone who actually died of COVID was one of my dad’s friends, who I never met. This man was 78 years old, obese, had uncontrolled Type 2 diabetes, and while Dad never saw him drink, believed he was also an alcoholic. In short, he had multiple risk factors.
I do realize that there were families and communities that saw extremely high death rates, mainly black and Hispanic in the U.S., and research is still being done regarding this.
If you or I were in charge of many thousands of people and there was a chance that a disease could kill a lot of them, we might make a very cautious decision too. And that would be very defensible, even if it proved to be mistaken.
More importantly, that’s a mistaken decision that I could forgive. I have a much harder time excusing decisions that were made whimsically, or ideologically. Remember Trump saying it would just disappear soon? Or ridiculing masks when (again, at the time) it was thought they might help, even if just a little?
School officials doing something drastic to prevent deaths with what limited information they had at the time is, to me, reasonable in hindsight. Ultimately mistaken, but reasonable at the time.
I remember this. Thankfully my kid’s private school didn’t close or go remote. I grumbled paying tuition, but so thankful for school administrators keeping their minds while so many others were losing theirs.
A major problem with the precautionary principle is that it doesn’t tell you which approach is more cautious, and really it exposes the biases of the speaker more than anything else.
An alternative way to apply the precautionary principle here is that we faced the choice of educating students, not in the way that has been done for centuries, but by socially isolating them at home for a year, with the only lines of communication being digital systems that had been repurposed from corporate use and unproven to be effective or even usable in an education setting. And the alleged benefit was an unproven reduction in serious infections, which even from first principles seemed unlikely assuming basic known precautions were taken, and where a change of approach could be taken rapidly if it did turn out that the assumptions were wrong.
Yeah. Also, the thing that I find very difficult to forgive is that a lot of people whom I generally respected and agreed with about other stuff tried to deny the harm to kids at the time. There were so many people in 2020-21, including education professionals who should have known better, insisting that learning loss wasn’t actually a thing, or that keeping schools closed was important because of “equity,” citing the fact that poor people and people of color had higher death rates from COVID. (Surprise, it turns out that kids from poor backgrounds were also the ones who lost the most ground from not being in school. Being poor in America sucks on basically all fronts.)
I get that it was a difficult descision, and there were valid arguments both for and against closing schools, but people really, really tended to discount the harms of their chosen course of action and exaggerate the ones on the other side as soon as they’d committed to their position. And I also get that the level of motivated reasoning and denial on the Trump side was much, much worse, but I also think if you’re going to frame your position as the one supported by science and evidence, you owe it to yourself and others to be completely honest about the uncertainties and tradeoffs, and not just handwave.
(I rarely spoke up about any of this at the time, BTW, since it was an obviously-unpopular position in my social circle, so I’m just as guilty as anyone.)
Yes, we might, but instead the governor made an incredibly risky and dangerous decision. Closing all of the schools in the state is not caution, especially not when the public health authorities are specifically advising against it. You think that long covid is bad? Long quarantine is going to still be with us fifty years hence.
Nor was it a decision based on the information, sparse or otherwise. At the time that the schools were closed, the governor told everyone that we should just treat it like an extended spring break, from which we’d return after two weeks. Then, once the closures extended all the way to the end of the school year, the governor declared that remote learning had been so successful that it wouldn’t be necessary to ever re-open schools (fortunately there was enough backlash that he backpedalled on that). That’s not caution; that’s willful blindness.
Right; I’m also not going to say there weren’t valid arguments for closures or that we weren’t operating on limited information. But I’m also not going to give infinite benefit of the doubt to the people advocating for maximum safety without any consideration for the negatives, nor will I impose maximum guilt on those who advocated for the opposite, even if they sometimes had bad reasons.
Oh, I’m certain of that. But the “lost x much” is a little deceptive when you ask if we should have relieved schools sooner, because the poorer kids lost an enormous amount when there was no school at all, as their systems struggled to find resources (like laptops) to do remote schooling at all. I think the last two months of “no in person school” were much less damaging than the first two months of “we have no idea at all what to do, we’ll let you know when we have something.”
It varied. I’ve talked to a lot of high school kids about it. Some were miserable. Some did fine. For that matter, i knew adults who were miserable and adults who did fine. My husband said, “I’m an introvert, i was made for this.” My mother said, “i hate zoom. Phone calls don’t cut it. Visit me.”
Huh, my uncle and aunt died in the first wave. Their only risk factor was being old. My mother died in the omicron wave. She had a lot of risk factors. A good friend who was in his 40s died shortly before vaccines would have been available to his age cohort. He was a little chubby. I dunno, it’s possible he he had some other risk factor i didn’t know about. A guy i used to work with died, also before vaccines were available to his age cohort. He was fat, and Black, but a well-paid professional. My cousin’s business partner and best friend died. He was about 60 with no other risk factors. Several other people i knew, but wasn’t close to, died of covid. And a friend lost his sister to a cancer that wasn’t diagnosed in time because the hospitals were backed up with covid deaths.
!!
Which state was that?
The thing that passed me off was the resistance to measures that are less costly, like requiring masks and improving ventilation. Actually closing schools is hugely costly. I felt like there was a lot of “all or nothing”.
Also, most states opened the bars before they opened the schools. That was just crazy.
Certainly true, especially since no education is really negative education, as we already know from the “summer slide”, which in some cases might be as strong as losing a week of education for every week of no education. You need a certain degree of positive education just to reach a no-backslide point.