The strongest prison is the one where you are afraid to leave even though the door is open!
There is no more heavy imprisonment than being afraid to be free! – Mehmet Murat ildan
The United States reported more deaths from COVID-19 last Friday (3/4/22) than deaths from Hurricane Katrina, more on any two recent weekdays than deaths during the 9/11 terrorist attacks, more last month than deaths from flu in a bad season, and more in two years than deaths from HIV during the four decades of the AIDS epidemic. At least 953,000 Americans have died from COVID, and the true toll is likely even higher because many deaths went uncounted. COVID is now the third leading cause of death in the U.S., after only heart disease and cancer, which are both catchall terms for many distinct diseases. The sheer scale of the tragedy strains the moral imagination. On May 24, 2020, as the United States passed 100,000 recorded deaths, The New York Times filled its front page with the names of the dead, describing their loss as “incalculable.” Now the nation hurtles toward a milestone of 1 million. What is 10 times incalculable?
– Ed Yong for The Atlantic
March 10, 2020, I got a tight fade at the Brothers Barbershop. Next day, we drove to Cedar Key and the NBA decided this novel virus was too serious to play ball. All I needed to hear.
And so we went into self-quarantine. Hell, that was two whole golden years ago. Still have grandchildren we haven’t seen since. Did what we thought was the safest bet for continued longevity. Might be the last two people in the grocery store still wearing masks. N-95s, too.
Florida is a tourist destination with a government funded by sales tax. Herd immunity was always the plan. Obviously. Just the other day our governor, Ron DeCovidis, bullied some children because they wore masks.
The state surgeon general recommended kids not get vaccinated at all. https://www.tampabay.com/news/health/2022/03/09/parents-mourn-teens-who-refused-to-get-covid-vaccine/
Buffet restaurants have remained open throughout. Parking lots packed.
Two years.
In Florida, data has been withheld. Censored. Hard to be aware of the danger, when nobody will tell you the truth.
Until your neighbors start dropping. Killed by relatives who were anti-vaxxers. And died themselves.
Information suppression only works so far – Putin knows this, too.
Got this from a New York paper. “Since January 2020, at least 1 in 5 people who live in Hernando County have been infected, and at least 1 in 189 people have died.”
I make that out to be around 1103 people. Including my friend Walt.
In between pandemic waves, after vaccination, we went out to dinner once, saw one family of children. After the boosters, two days at a cross-country championship.
The problem locally seems worse now than ever.
When you believe planet earth is round – I’ve seen pictures – and your neighbors all believe it’s flat, life can feel uncomfortable.
Especially if you believe in the demonstrated curative powers of modern medicine and they believe God will protect them.
They’ve seen pictures, too.
Life in red America and blue America is quite different.
A modest gap
By David Leonhardt for The New York Times.
Daily life in red and blue America has continued to be quite different over the past few months. It’s a reflection of the partisan divide over Covid-19. Consider:
In the country’s most liberal cities, many people are still avoiding restaurants. The number of seated diners last month was at least 40 percent below prepandemic levels in New York, Philadelphia, Minneapolis, San Francisco, Portland, Ore., and Cambridge, Mass., according to OpenTable. By contrast, the number of diners has fully recovered in Las Vegas, Miami, Nashville, Phoenix, Charlotte, N.C., and Austin, Texas, as well as in Oklahoma, Nebraska and New Hampshire.
Residents of liberal cities like New York, Washington and San Jose, Calif., are still spending significantly more time at home and less at the office than before the pandemic began, according to Opportunity Insights, a Harvard-based research group. In more conservative places, the rhythms of daily life have returned nearly to normal.
During the Omicron wave, schools in heavily Democratic areas were more likely to close some classrooms or require that students stay home for extended periods.
Mask wearing remains far more common in liberal communities than conservative ones.
These stark differences have created a kind of natural experiment: Did Omicron spread less in the parts of the U.S. where social distancing and masking were more common?
The answer is surprisingly unclear.
Nationwide, the number of official Covid cases has recently been somewhat higher in heavily Democratic areas than Republican areas, according to The Times’s data. That comparison doesn’t fully answer the question, though, because Democratic areas were also conducting more tests, and the percentage of positive tests tended to be somewhat higher in Republican areas.
No single statistic offers a definitive answer. When I look at all the evidence, I emerge thinking that liberal areas probably had slightly lower Omicron infection rates than conservative areas. But it is difficult to be sure, as these state-level charts — by my colleague Ashley Wu — suggest:
 Charts show 7-day averages. | Sources: New York Times database; Edison Research |
The lack of a clear pattern is itself striking. Remember, not only have Democratic voters been avoiding restaurants and wearing masks; they are also much more likely to be vaccinated and boosted (and vaccines substantially reduce the chances of infection). Combined, these factors seem as if they should have caused large differences in case rates.
They have not. And that they haven’t offers some clarity about the relative effectiveness of different Covid interventions.
Vaccines, above all
The first lesson is that Covid vaccines are remarkably effective at preventing severe illness. Here are the same four states from the above charts, this time with death rates instead of case rates:
 Sources: New York Times database; Edison Research |
The messiness of the previous charts has given way to an obvious pattern: Covid death has been far more common in red America. Over the past three months, the death rate in counties that Donald Trump won in a landslide has been more than twice as high as the rate in counties that Joe Biden won in a landslide, according to Charles Gaba, a health care analyst.
The second lesson is that interventions other than vaccination — like masking and distancing — are less powerful than we might wish. How could this be, given that scientific evidence suggests that mask wearing and social distancing can reduce the spread of a virus?
Early in the Omicron wave, at least one expert accurately predicted this seeming paradox. Dr. Christopher Murray, the founder of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, wrote an article for The Lancet, a medical journal, arguing that interventions like masks would have “limited impact on the course of the Omicron wave.”
I followed up with him by email, and he offered a helpful explanation. Although masks reduce the chances of transmission in any individual encounter, Omicron is so contagious that it can overwhelm the individual effect, he said.
I’ve come to think of the point this way: Imagine that you carry around a six-sided die that determines whether you contract Covid, and you must roll it every time you enter an indoor space with other people. Without a mask, you will get Covid if you roll a one or a two. With a mask, you will get Covid only if you roll a one.
You can probably see the problem: Either way, you’ll almost certainly get Covid.
This analogy exaggerates your chances of getting infected, but it still highlights the basic reason that masks and distancing have had a limited effect. “It really is a function of the extreme intensity of Omicron transmission,” Murray told me.
 Getting a shot in New Jersey. Bryan Anselm for The New York Times |
A 95 percent drop
Together, these two lessons can point the way to a sensible approach to Covid in the coming months.
One, nothing matters nearly as much as vaccination. A continued push to persuade skeptics to get shots — and to make sure that people are receiving booster shots — will save lives.
Two, there is a strong argument for continuing to remove other restrictions, and returning to normal life, now that Omicron caseloads have fallen 95 percent from their peak. If those restrictions were costless, then their small benefits might still be worth it. But of course they do have costs.
Masks hamper people’s ability to communicate, verbally and otherwise. Social distancing leads to the isolation and disruption that have fed so many problems over the past two years — mental health troubles, elevated blood pressure, drug overdoses, violent crime, vehicle crashes and more.
If a new variant emerges, and hospitals are again at risk of being overwhelmed, then reinstating Covid restrictions may make sense again, despite their modest effects. But that’s not where the country is today.
Related: Hawaii became the final state to announce it would drop its indoor mask mandate. And my colleague Dana Goldstein looked at the “alarming” amount of pandemic learning loss, with the biggest effects on students who are Black, Latino, lower-income, disabled or not fluent in English.
I don’t know what the right answer is. Your results may vary.
But in certain neighborhoods, say Hernando County, Florida – with the highest per capita death rate in the state – and you are, I don’t know, seventy-five-years old or older, with a pre-existing condition or two, it must be said – my body, my choice.
“I don’t quibble with the messaging that we need to return to normal, but we cannot pretend that everyone can live a pre-pandemic life. We need to remain respectful of the severe threat that COVID-19 continues to pose to a subset of people in our community.” Today is 6/6/2022 and I am in that subset in a community that remains 45% unvaccinated.