Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Wow, you are pre-disappointed. How surprising.

When I decide to be condescending, you won’t have to dream up a fantasy about it.

Not all heroes wear capes.

The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

There’s some extremely good trouble headed their way.

We can agree to disagree, but i’m right.

How do you get liars to care about the truth?

They traffic in fear. it is their only currency. if we are fearful, they are winning.

Shelter in place is one thing. Shelter in pants is quite another.

Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to.

We still have time to mess this up!

It’s the corruption, stupid.

Almost as fun as hiking the Appalachian Trail

Today in our ongoing national embarrassment…

… down to kool-aid drinkers and next of kin at the trump White House

The math demands it!

This blog will pay for itself.

… makes me wish i had hoarded more linguine

Fuck if i know. i just get yelled at when i try it.

I personally stopped the public option…

Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

The revolution will be supervised.

No one could have predicted…

Something seems odd about that, but i have been drinking.

You are here: Home / Archives for Healthcare / COVID-19 Coronavirus

COVID-19 Coronavirus Updates: Tuesday/Wednesday, Dec. 22-23

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COVID-19 Coronavirus Updates: Monday/Tuesday, Dec. 21-22

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Monday Evening Open Thread: Jab, Jab, Jab

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COVID, Vaccinations, Congress and Partisanship

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We can see light at the end of the tunnel.

Vaccines are in the pipeline. We think Fall 2021 can look a lot more like 2019 than 2020.

We are going to go through the suck until a large number of people have either their shots or recover from infections.

A vaccine sitting in a warehouse or a doctor’s office is just a funny looking fluid.  It is only valuable when it is in someone’s arm and priming an immune response.

We know that COVID response rates are heavily polarized on partisan lines.  A recent article in Science  showed that partisanship had a huge valance on behavior independent of actual risk levels:

Using daily data on the reported activities of 1,135,638 U.S. adults collected starting on April 4, 2020, we show that partisanship is 27 times more important than the local incidence of COVID-19 in explaining mobility. Moreover, all else equal, Democrats are 13.1 percent less likely to be socially mobile over time compared to independents, while Republicans are
27.8 percent more likely to be mobile.

We know that partisanship had significant premium effects in the ACA:

Insurers have increased marketplace premiums at higher rates in areas with more Republican voters. In the preferred model specification, a 10-percentage-point difference in Republican vote share is associated with a 3.2-percentage-point increase in average premium growth for a standard plan. A variety of robustness and placebo checks suggest the relationship is driven by partisanship.

We know partisanship has both real world consequences in behaviors that have both real individual and social costs.  Partisanship allows people to outsource their thinking to trusted political leaders and opinion coalition merchants.

We know that we need, to use a technical term, a shit ton of people to get vaccinated.  We want mass vaccination to happen as quickly as possible as the cost of additional suffering in a three month delay to go from 100 million people vaccinated to 200 million people vaccinated would be significant (the economic costs would be high too).

We know that a good chunk of those people who need to be vaccinated are currently getting their political and social cues from elites that have downplayed the entire coronavirus pandemic.

So when members of the elite political class  who have been spewing out  “plandemic”, “open-up”, “herd immunity”, “personal responsibility”,  “let it rip”, “merely a flu” messaging for almost a year now get vaccinated on camera with a smile and a thumbs up, that is very important new information going to people who won’t listen to liberals or pointy-headed nerds.  It is a message that vaccines are not bad, they might be good, and trusted elites trust them.

Roll your eyes privately, but I would rather be in a world with 80% or 90% vaccination rates driven by mass elite hypocrisy that allowed for a right wing permission structure to get vaccinated than a world of 50% vaccination rates and consistent messaging that keeps a good chunk of the US population suspicious of vaccines.

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COVID-19 Coronavirus Updates: Sunday/Monday, Dec. 20-21

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Excellent (Horrifying) Read: Trump & His Cronies vs. the Virus

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I keep stockpiling stories too long for the daily link-aggregations, because there’s just *too much news* every damned day. But this Washington Post story is well worth the click (hell, the subscription, if you can get one) — “The inside story of how Trump’s denial, mismanagement and magical thinking led to the pandemic’s dark winter”:

… After their warnings had gone largely unheeded for months in the dormant West Wing, Deborah Birx, Anthony S. Fauci, Stephen Hahn and Robert Redfield together sounded new alarms, cautioning of a dark winter to come without dramatic action to slow community spread.

White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, among the many Trump aides who were infected with the virus this fall, was taken aback, according to three senior administration officials with knowledge of the discussions. He told the doctors he did not believe their troubling data assessment. And he accused them of outlining problems without prescribing solutions.

The doctors explained that the solutions were simple and had long been clear — among them, to leverage the power of the presidential bully pulpit to persuade all Americans to wear masks, especially the legions of Trump supporters refusing to do so, and to dramatically expand testing…

Trump went days without mentioning the pandemic other than to celebrate progress on vaccines. The president by then had abdicated his responsibility to manage the public health crisis and instead used his megaphone almost exclusively to spread misinformation in a failed attempt to overturn the results of the election he lost to President-elect Joe Biden.

“I think he’s just done with covid,” said one of Trump’s closest advisers who, like many others interviewed for this story, spoke on the condition of anonymity to candidly discuss internal deliberations and operations. “I think he put it on a timetable and he’s done with covid. . . . It just exceeded the amount of time he gave it.”…

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COVID-19 Coronavirus Updates: Saturday/Sunday, Dec. 19-20

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