outbreak! (ebola, sars, coronavirus, etc)

“What if I told you COVID funding was being curbed . . . during a pandemic? Next time on Serial.”

pulling the 4th tweet in the chain, without context, is confusing.

Last week, after two years of being painfully careful around covid -- like, so careful it annoyed the rest of my moderately careful family -- I decided to visit my new Canary Wharf workplace, where they never get covid, then go for an outdoor pint and have a nice long evening walk along the Thames to the Tate. Reader, I got covid.

Aw man!

My understanding is that the Republicans in Congress were once again threatening to shut down the government as leverage in negotiating the budget. The R's wanted covid funding offset by cuts, iow their usual switch to a deficit hawk posture when they don't run the government. A compromise was brokered where unspent covid money allocated last year would be redirected to cover half the the covid spending in the projected budget.

This infuriated some Dem legislators who represented states that had definite plans to spend that unspent money and they rebelled. The compromise with the R's blew up and as the deadline for passing a budget had almost arrived, that covid spending was removed from the omnibus budget and floated off as a separate bill, which drops it out of reconciliation and probably kills it.

But my understanding could be wrong in some of the particulars.

xpost - sorry, that one just felt particularly egregious because of the "limit to push to help poorer countries" part, which is why I shared it

egregious? it's the administration pointing out consequences if funding doesn't pass.

I understand that. I can still be upset that it's a risk, no?

Dr. Jay Varma, an epidemiologist who was a senior health adviser to former Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York City, warned that people should be prepared for another wave of cases and not let their guard down.

“We have to plan for the worst and hope for the best, like hurricane season,” he said.

I feel like inevitably people are going to read this as saying "scientist says another wave is coming" when he's actually saying "another wave might or might not be coming so we should be prepared rather than assuming it's definitely all over"

There's a really good book someone recommended to me years ago called "The Confidence Trap: A History of Democracy in Crisis from World War I to the Present" (the then 2014 present, with a 2015 update). The gist:

In The Confidence Trap, David Runciman shows that democracies are good at recovering from emergencies but bad at avoiding them. The lesson democracies tend to learn from their mistakes is that they can survive them―and that no crisis is as bad as it seems. Breeding complacency rather than wisdom, crises lead to the dangerous belief that democracies can muddle through anything―a confidence trap that may lead to a crisis that is just too big to escape, if it hasn't already. The most serious challenges confronting democracy today are debt, the war on terror, the rise of China, and climate change. If democracy is to survive them, it must figure out a way to break the confidence trap.

That's about where we are now. I think many of our brains naturally respond to "always be ready for the worst, which could come at any time" with a "then there's nothing we can really do about it" sort of fatalism. That may be where we are now, and perhaps is where we've been all along.

I feel like inevitably people are going to read this as saying "scientist says another wave is coming" when he's actually saying "another wave might or might not be coming so we should be prepared rather than assuming it's definitely all over"

caek otm

but there are some people right now getting really, really angry if you point out the inevitability of another wave coming

who?

Anyway, before the movement in Europe, I'd assumed we'd get another wave in a month, so if y'all have jabbed kids and are still hesitating about going to movies, eating indoors, etc., there's no reason not to do it now while positivity and case loads are bearable.

Anyway, before the movement in Europe, I'd assumed we'd get another wave in a month, so if y'all have jabbed kids and are still hesitating about going to movies, eating indoors, etc., there's no reason not to do it now while positivity and case loads are bearable.

People deep in denial. Lots of them in the expected corners of Twitter, Reddit, etc. but I've encountered a few of them in real life as well. A coworker got furious when we were talking about the European wave and shouted us down. An otherwise well meaning friend accused another friend of "doom and gloom fearmongering" for simply sharing a tweet about the European uptick.

Some people have their heads happily buried in the sand right now.

Which isn't to say anything about guessing the severity of the wave headed here, it's just that people don't even like it being pointed out. I think it's pretty naive at this point, though, to pretend that we aren't going to see an uptick in cases in the very near future.

Eh, for most people another wave is (arguably correctly) not going to change anything about how they behave, assuming it’s smaller than the first omicron wave (which seems likely).

Right, don't disagree with that at all. I was just taken aback by the coworker's vehemence when the European uptick was casually noted.

Yeah the statement “there will not be another wave” is ludicrous.

So is “maybe there will, maybe there won’t” tbh

yeah my work has been 3 days per week in office since march 1st, and I'm looking at it as potentially/probably just a nice interlude where we can reestablish some of our face to face energy before more shit happens

also though nyc is weird compared to other localities and, i feel, especially hard to predict how its trajectory will relate to everyone else's

I understand the vehemence. It's not a logical response but rather a fear-based response. A trauma response, even. This COVID shit has fucked everybody up psychologically, in a variety of ways and probably for some time to come.

Seems to me that covid has proved its ability to rapidly morph into successful new variants. the first omicron variant is less than six months old, contagious to a degree almost unprecedented in virology, and appears to have thrown off a marginally more successful variant already. the world's population is far less 'naive' and has developed some resistance, but we have not caught up with the virus' ability to run ahead of us.

to my mind the real question isn't whether there will be new waves, but whether the successive waves will be as damaging and deadly, or much less so. there's room to think that omicron will be the high water mark of this pandemic and future waves will look less frightening even as they continue to generate large numbers of infections when judged against recent non-covid epidemics.

There is definitely a wave rn. For example, I now have the blasted rona for the first confirmed time

So is “maybe there will, maybe there won’t” tbh

I have been wrong about this stuff so many times in the past that I have long since resolved that the answer to questions about the future course of COVID is ALWAYS "maybe yes, maybe no." When the next wave comes it will not mean that it was certain to have come.

i mean i don't know for sure that evolution is true. it's just a theory. but i am once again asking people to note that everything that every time a wave happened in europe, it happens 1-2 months later in the US.

Hey French people, it looks like the “Pass Sanitaire” is no longer needed?

The number of friends who've gotten it in the past month or so is exponentially higher than it has been at any other point. Anecdata, of course, but I mean it's certainly made me feel like a wave is coming if it's not already here.

my supervisor got it after they required managers to go to the office to get ready for the rest of us to come back. she was off friday and monday and still has symptoms. i don't care if i'm not going to die from it, that's not something that makes me eager to be in an office.

Several friends got it in January and February but since then nothing. But the truth is, I don't know many people who've had COVID, or, more accurately, I don't know that many people who know they had it and who told me they had it.

Omicron blew through my extended circle in mid-December, sparing no one except me and my family and closest friends. So far nothing since, but, after all, these people still take precautions despite new guidelines.

Isn’t a new wave just a result of the whole US just dropping everything? No more required masks, we are all going back to work, etc

the only thing that confuses this for me is that I don't think this last wave declined so rapidly because of any particular restrictions

It (temporarily) ran out of people to infect.

xxp, it's looks like the european wave that's starting now is BA.2 (i.e. the other omicron variant).

it's definitely not recent changes in NPI in the US. there's no wave here yet, and NPIs barely existed 3 months ago in most of the country anyway.

two out of my team of 20 at work are now off with it, both vaxxed and having a not great time of it-- not hospital level, but just like a really really bad cold or flu, one of them was snuggled up on a sofa with two other team members at an in-person team meeting last week. (I was the weirdo wearing my N95 mask in that meeting because I knew I was seeing my ILs last weekend and didn't want to bring them the London germs, whether COVID or lurgy)

i mean i don't know for sure that evolution is true. it's just a theory. but i am once again asking people to note that everything that every time a wave happened in europe, it happens 1-2 months later in the US.

lol as if m8, how would it even get here?

The UK's busiest airport will abandon the requirement to wear a mask from Wednesday this week.

A statement from Heathrow read: “Face coverings will remain available at the airport to support those who wish to continue wearing them."

The airport’s chief operating officer, Emma Gilthorpe, said: “We’re gearing up for a busy summer travel season, and this change means we can look forward to welcoming our passengers back with a smile as we get them safely away on their journeys.”

British Airways and Virgin Atlantic welcomed the move.

Jason Mahoney, BA’s chief operating officer, said: “For destinations where the wearing of a face covering is not mandated, our customers are able to make a personal choice, and we kindly request everyone respects each other’s preferences.”

Corneel Koster, chief customer and operating officer for Virgin Atlantic, said: “As we learn to live with Covid and with the legal requirement to wear a face mask now removed in England, we believe our customers should have the personal choice whether to wear a mask onboard, on routes where international regulations around mask-wearing do not apply.

“We encourage everyone to be respectful of fellow passengers’ mask preferences.”

fwiw, BA appears to have reversed the decision to make masks optional today.

lol sic but masks at the airport don't matter, any more than wearing a mask while you walk from the door to your table at a restaurant matters.

A lot of passengers hang out in the airport for multiple hours, and hundreds and hundreds of staff do.

eh, they hang out in the covid island before then for multiple weeks.

Not if they're transferring from elsewhere.

(Normalising masking in indoor public situations has a salutary effect beyond the specific utility in each venue. Requiring customer-facing workers to do so unmasked, in thousands of encounters a day with people travelling from any number of exciting-new-variant hotspots, is simply murderous.)

i agree, but is not relevant to the point i'm making (no masking at heathrow will make no difference to the US).

The robust tracing system at both ends will at least let us know whether any cases are acquired en route. 👍

fwiw, BA appears to have reversed the decision to make masks optional today.

Thanks for this - looks like there's no policy reversal announced, but flight staff maybe pushing back?

I received my next batch of government covid tests in the mail today, so I guess I'm at least ready for this next wave

xps
I work at an airport and the rest of the time on 'covid island' I'm not around any other people so not wearing masks at said airport affects me at least. calculating at what point the percentage of passengers not wearing masks makes me wearing one pointless. as ever let's hope it's mild when I get it( have avoided so far afaik)

this newsletter very good and reasonable as per usual

https://calmcovid.substack.com/p/the-omicron-sequel-no-one-wanted

Thanks. Good read.

bad news: the one-star reviews are coming back! pic.twitter.com/7E42fEVcjN

— drewtoothpaste (@drewtoothpaste) March 20, 2022