COVID-19 Update

World

New Cases:    441,868 (⬆︎ .35%)
New Deaths:       7,555 (⬆︎ .27%)

USA

New Cases:    59,707 (⬆︎ .19%)
New Deaths:        639 (⬆︎ .11%)

Vaccination Scorecard

Total Vaccinations:           95 million (⬆︎ 1.5%)
Total Eligible Population:  35.6%
Total Population:               28.6%

It should be obvious that we're not out of the woods yet, and even once we've gotten thru this part of the fight, we won't know for sure how much farther we have to go.

The point being that we have to power thru this immunization project with all due alacrity so we can be ready to implement the next part of the strategic plan.

WaPo: (pay wall)

You may be among the more than 95 million people in the United States who have taken at least one dose of a coronavirus vaccine. Or you may still be awaiting your turn. Regardless, there’s a crucial question on most of our minds: How long will the vaccine really protect us?

As with most aspects of the virus, the answer is not completely clear. Why? Because although we have been battling the pandemic for more than a year, the vaccines were granted emergency use authorization relatively recently. So experts have not had time to observe their long-term effectiveness.

However, that research is underway, and in the meantime, experts say we can make an educated guess.

How long will vaccine immunity last?

Federal health authorities have not provided a definitive answer to this question.

But based on clinical trials, experts do know that vaccine-induced immunity should last a minimum of about three months. That does not mean protective immunity will expire after 90 days; that was simply the time frame participants were studied in the initial Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson trials. As researchers continue to study the vaccines, that shelf life is expected to grow.

In the real world, immunity from the vaccines should last quite a bit longer, though the length of time still needs to be determined with further studies, experts said.

There are also certain factors that may influence immunity.

Chunhuei Chi, director of the Center for Global Health at Oregon State University, said immune responses vary from person to person. People who have a stronger immune response to a vaccine will produce more antibodies and memory cells — and therefore have stronger immunity, he said. But there is not currently evidence to show that a stronger immune response will increase the duration of immunity.

And it does not mean people with a stronger immune response will have more severe side effects from the shots or vice versa, according to a recent survey by the British National Health System.

Immunity could also depend on what happens with future variants. If a person were exposed to a variant capable of evading vaccine-induced antibodies, for instance, a vaccine might not be as effective as initially expected, said Lana Dbeibo, an infectious-disease expert at the Indiana University School of Medicine.

Although researchers do not yet have all the answers, previous knowledge of other coronaviruses, as well as emerging research about the current strain, may provide clues.

Looking at studies on natural immunity from the coronavirus, experts hypothesize that protective immunity from the vaccines will last at least six to eight months. And if immunity from SARS-CoV-2 ends up being similar to other seasonal coronaviruses, such as “common colds,” it is even possible the vaccines could provide protection for up to a year or two before requiring a booster, the experts said.

Can we extrapolate from what we know about natural immunity?

Yes.

In fact, much of this hypothesizing comes from extrapolating data examining immune responses in people who have had covid-19 and illnesses from other coronaviruses, rather than in people who have been vaccinated, said Dbeibo, who is director of vaccine initiatives for Indiana University.

“But vaccine responses should not be less reliable than in natural infection,” she added.

Current research shows that people who have been infected with covid-19, the illness caused by the coronavirus, retained immunity that was robust after eight months. That gives researchers a starting point in predicting how long immunity may last after vaccination, Dbeibo explained.

But research also shows people who had more severe cases developed a stronger immune reaction than those with milder forms of the disease. And because vaccine-induced immunity appears to be more similar to natural immunity that is derived from severe covid-19 infections, researchers say they believe people who take a coronavirus vaccine will be protected better than most people with natural immunity, said David Topham, a professor of microbiology and immunology at the University of Rochester.

All of that said, antibodies will wane. And although it is a gradual process, once antibodies decline to a level that is no longer protective, reinfection is possible. Still, the infection is likely to be milder, experts said.

Topham, founding director of the Translational Immunology and Infectious Disease Institute at the University of Rochester, has been studying the coronavirus and the role of memory B cells — immune cells that persist for a lifetime and produce antibodies when re-exposed to a pathogen that they have been programmed to fight. He said some people who were hospitalized with severe covid-19 infections still had high frequencies of memory B cells, as well as antibodies, up to nine months after infection.

He said memory B cells can even adapt quickly to a new variant, usually within days.

“Even if antibody levels wane and you get reinfected or you get infected with a variant, the memory B cells — if you have enough of them — will respond very quickly and prevent that severe disease,” he said.

Experts are also speculating whether immunity to SARS-CoV-2 will be as durable as with seasonal coronaviruses, which people contract repeatedly throughout their lifetimes. Experts estimate that immunity from those coronaviruses lasts a couple of years, and some experts predict that, in time, that may be the case with the current virus.

“I think this coronavirus is going to become like other seasonal coronaviruses in that you will either be vaccinated or infected as a child, have a mild illness and then when you see it as an adult, you’re going to have some immunity. While it’s not going to protect you from getting infected, the worst you’ll get is a bad cold,” Topham said.

He said covid-19 is severe right now because “adults are seeing this virus for the very first time and have no preexisting immunity.”

So what now?

Experts are still trying to determine how long it will take for antibodies to decrease to the point that they are no longer protective. But once that happens, people will need boosters to remind their immune systems to make more antibodies against the disease, the experts said.

Chi, with Oregon State University, said Pfizer, Moderna and others are conducting clinical trials to determine how long a booster shot will extend protective immunity and to determine whether their vaccines can be tailored to combat new variants of the virus. And Johnson & Johnson is testing a two-dose version of its vaccine.

So far, evidence suggests the available vaccines are still effective against most variants, but that could change if the virus continues to mutate, Chi said. Chi explained that the more prevalent the virus and the longer it takes to vaccinate people against it, the higher the risk of developing mutations that will then make the vaccines less effective. That’s why, he said, it’s urgent to “vaccinate as many people as fast as possible.”

“We are running against time,” he said.

Differences

My family and I are mourning the loss of our beloved grandmother, Sarah Ogwel Onyango Obama, affectionately known to many as “Mama Sarah” but known to us as “Dani” or Granny. Born in the first quarter of the last century, in Nyanza Province, on the shores of Lake Victoria, she had no formal schooling, and in the ways of her tribe, she was married off to a much older man while only a teen. She would spend the rest of her life in the tiny village of Alego, in a small home built of mud-and thatch brick and without electricity or indoor plumbing. There she raised eight children, tended to her goats and chickens, grew an assortment of crops, and took what the family didn’t use to sell at the local open-air market.

Although not his birth mother, Granny would raise my father as her own, and it was in part thanks to her love and encouragement that he was able to defy the odds and do well enough in school to get a scholarship to attend an American university. When our family had difficulties, her homestead was a refuge for her children and grandchildren, and her presence was a constant, stabilizing force. When I first traveled to Kenya to learn more about my heritage and father, who had passed away by then, it was Granny who served as a bridge to the past, and it was her stories that helped fill a void in my heart.

During the course of her life, Granny would witness epochal changes taking place around the globe: world war, liberation movements, moon landings, and the advent of the computer age. She would live to fly on jets, receive visitors from around the world, and see one of her grandsons get elected to the United States presidency. And yet her essential spirit—strong, proud, hard-working, unimpressed with conventional marks of status and full of common sense and good humor—never changed.

We will miss her dearly, but celebrate with gratitude her long and remarkable life.

I think we can anticipate the hatred that's likely to come from the "conservatives" on this.

And unfortunately, it's not weird that they'll do their best to shit on this while trying even harder to deny the simple fact that if this was a politician mourning the loss of his dear old grandma back in Italy or Denmark or Ireland or Lithuania, or wherever, they wouldn't think twice about sending their thoughts and prayers.

The Self Pimp

If I'm a former POTUS, and somebody asks me to make a few remarks at their wedding - which they've paid me bucketsful of cash to put on at my club - I dunno - I think I get up and I say nice things about my guests and I make some effort not to make the whole fuckin' thing about me and my most recent failures.

How It Works

The best pitch is no pitch.

The best hustle is no hustle.

But you can turn that upside down - which is what the bad guys always figure out - and you get: The best way to scam someone is to play on their basic paranoia about being scammed.

CBS News:

A new report by the Center for Countering Digital Hate finds that "just 12 anti-vaxxers are responsible for almost two-thirds of anti-vaccine content circulating on social media platforms." The so-called "Disinformation Dozen" remain prominent figures on platforms like Facebook and Twitter, despite repeatedly violating their terms of service, according to the center.

"Living in full view of the public on the internet are a small group of individuals who do not have relevant medical expertise and have their own pockets to line, who are abusing social media platforms to misrepresent the threat of COVID and spread misinformation about the safety of vaccines," reads the report from the nonprofit organization, which works to disrupt "the spread of digital hate and misinformation."

The center identified the dozen "because they have large numbers of followers, produce high volumes of anti-vaccine content or have seen rapid growth of their social media accounts in the last two months." Among them are Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who leads an anti-vaccine group; Dr. Joseph Mercola, who has made a fortune selling dietary supplements as alternatives to vaccines; and Ty and Charlene Bollinger, founders of "The Truth About Cancer."

"They're not just individuals... these are individuals who have behind them large companies that they themselves run, which pump out misinformation with the aim of persuading people not to follow the clinical guidance, and to instead buy their false cures, or to buy access to the information they claim is the truth about coronavirus and about vaccines," Imran Ahmed, founder and CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, told CBSN on Wednesday.

The center analyzed over 812,000 Facebook and Twitter vaccine-related posts shared between February 1 and March 16 of this year. Sixty-five percent percent of anti-vaccine posts came from one of the 12 "Disinformation Dozen."

"Anti-vaccine activists on Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and Twitter reach more than 59 million followers, making these the largest and most important social media platforms for anti-vaxxers," according to the report. The center also found that these accounts specifically target Black Americans, who've been less likely to get vaccinated so far.
The organization has called for Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Twitter to deplatform the "Disinformation Dozen" as well as the organizations they are linked to. Three of the 12 have been comprehensively removed from at least one platform, but none have been removed from all.

"Facebook, Google and Twitter have put policies into place to prevent the spread of vaccine misinformation; yet to date, all have failed to satisfactorily enforce those policies," reads the report. "All have been particularly ineffective at removing harmful and dangerous misinformation about coronavirus vaccines, though the scale of misinformation on Facebook, and thus the impact of their failure, is larger."

A spokesman for Twitter told CBS News it had removed 22,400 tweets under its COVID-19 "misleading information policy" and "challenged" nearly 12 million accounts. Dani Lever, a spokesperson for Facebook, said the company has removed more than 2 million pieces of content since February.

Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg told lawmakers on the House Energy and Commerce Committee at a hearing Thursday that his platform separates misinformation into categories, the most serious being what could cause "imminent physical harm." False claims about the coronavirus, or its vaccines, he said, could lead to someone getting sick, and therefore would be removed.

"That's the broad approach that we have … that sort of explains some of the differences between some of the different issues and how we approach them," Zuckerberg said.

That "broad approach" has been criticized by a group of 12 state attorneys general who have urged Facebook and Twitter to "take immediate steps" to crack down on online "anti-vaxxer" falsehoods amid the ongoing effort to vaccinate the public against COVID-19.

In a letter to Zuckerberg and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey on Wednesday, the attorneys general pressed the social media giants to fully "identify and enforce" the companies' terms of service to combat against vaccine disinformation and misinformation.

"A small group of individuals use your platforms to downplay the dangers of COVID-19 and spread misinformation about the safety of vaccines," the group said, citing CCDH's report. "These individuals lack medical expertise and are often motivated by financial interests."

In addition to deplatforming the dozen, the center also recommends platforms establish a clear threshold for enforcement action, display corrective posts to users exposed to disinformation, add warning screens when users click links to misinformation sites, institute an Accountability API (application programming interface), and ban private and secret anti-vaccine Facebook Groups.

"(Their) content has the potential of harming human life," Ahmed told CBSN. "Not just the individuals themselves, but more cruelly, the people they love and our communities as a whole."

The unfortunate part of this story is that the Press Poodles pull up short of explaining the mechanisms available to the scammers that amplify their shit so effectively.

Just manufacturing the shit doesn't get that shit distributed to a global marketplace.

The armies of Bots and Paid Influencers are at least as much to blame for propagating the shit as are the originators of the shit.

So it's a matter of applying some fairly simple business principles - particularly: Capturing The Cycle - the old Coors Model.

• I want the best possible price on barley and hops, so I own the farms where these things are grown.
• I want cheap transport rates, so I own a fleet of delivery vehicles - including a private railroad.
• I want to expand my production capacity, so I own a construction company, including the cement mines and concrete plants.

You get the idea.

So if I want to get my message out and make myself look and sound bigger than I am, I buy the available technology to boost amplitude while hiding the truth behind the anonymity of the intertoobz.

An awful lot of normal people aren't going to notice the telltale signs that indicate "@JimmyFriday0201563247" isn't a real guy - with his 3 followers and 32,000 retweets.

If I have the means to get my shit out across half a dozen Social Media platforms, I can make my ideas look a lot more popular than I am - and popularity sells.

Never forget that once upon a time, the Ford Pinto was one of the best-selling cars in America, and right about that same time, we had Pet Rocks and disco.

Do it right, and nobody really knows that most of your "followers" and "supporters" are figments of the troll farmers' imaginations, with just enough gullible rubes on board to make it all look legit.

COVID-19 Update

World

New Cases:    487,487 (⬆︎ .38%)
New Deaths:       6,921 (⬆︎ .25%)

USA

New Cases:    44,096 (⬆︎ .14%)
New Deaths:        510 (⬆︎ .09%)

Vaccination Scorecard

Total Vaccinations:          93.6 million (⬆︎ 2.07%)
Total Eligible Population: 35.0%
Total Population:              28.9%

Can I get out now, and do my usual shit again?

WaPo: (pay wall)

What can I do after I get vaccinated?

The CDC advises fully vaccinated people that they can gather indoors with other fully vaccinated people without wearing masks or social distancing. The agency also says fully vaccinated people can gather indoors with unvaccinated people from a single household without wearing masks or social distancing — if the unvaccinated are healthy and at low risk of contracting severe covid-19 disease. That would free older people to see nearby children and grandchildren. But long-distance travel is still discouraged.

Visits to unvaccinated people at higher risk, such as older people or those with underlying health conditions, still should be conducted outdoors, or in a well-ventilated space, and with masks on, the CDC says.

The CDC considers fully vaccinated to mean two weeks after a final shot of vaccine.

Fully vaccinated people also do not need to quarantine or be tested if they are exposed to the virus as long as they do not develop symptoms. Fully vaccinated employees of high-density workplaces such as meatpacking plants without symptoms also do not need to quarantine after an exposure. But a test is recommended to be certain.

Public health experts say in the short term, life will look much the same after you get vaccinated, until a larger share of the population is vaccinated and the pandemic is curbed. For the most part, they recommend that people still wear masks and maintain their distance around most people.

One reason for caution is that the vaccines in use are 95 percent — but not 100 percent — effective at preventing covid-19 from the original strain of the coronavirus they were tested against, but may confer less protection against newer variants first identified in South Africa and Brazil that are now circulating in the United States. So there is a small possibility that people who are vaccinated could get sick, though it is very unlikely they would be hospitalized or die.

Scientists haven’t ruled out the possibility that people who have been inoculated can transmit the virus to the unvaccinated. They are hoping to have data on that issue in the next few months and, if it shows that vaccinated people cannot be carriers, that could lead to more relaxed interactions.

Today's Tweet

I was raised by them - I am them

PERFECTION pic.twitter.com/auhntYdoaf

— Dr.WearYourFnMask (@PissOffTrumpz) March 27, 2021

COVID-19 Update

World

New Cases:   580,250 (⬆︎ .46%)
New Deaths:      9,805 (⬆︎ .35%)

USA

New Cases:    63,659 (⬆︎ .21%)
New Deaths:        788 (⬆︎ .14%)

Vaccination Scorecard

Total Vaccinations:           91.7 million (⬆︎ 2.34%)
Total Eligible Population: 34.3%
Total Population:              27.6%

It's good that people can do for themselves - they get themselves organized, and they start doing things for themselves and each other.

All good.

It's also good when government helps - either by recognizing their efforts and reaching out with a little assistance, or just by staying out of the way.

And here's a question: When getting your community organized in order to respond to a problem is almost always seen as a good thing by almost everybody, why is it that Republicans (usually) almost always shit on people for being "community organizers"?.

NYT: (pay wall)

A Volunteer Army’s Mission: Vaccinate Black People in the Rural South

In the face of limited transportation, patchy internet service and threadbare medical care, community leaders in Alabama and Mississippi are trying to shrink the racial disparities in vaccine access.

The dog-eared trailer that serves as the only convenience store within 20 miles of this blink-and-you-miss-it rural hamlet, population 144, is more than a place to stock up on life’s essentials. These days the store — or more precisely its proprietor, Dorothy Oliver — has become an unofficial logistics hub for African-American residents seeking the coronavirus vaccine.

Even as vaccine supplies in Alabama have become more plentiful, Ms. Oliver’s neighbors, many of them older and poor, lack the smartphones and internet service needed to book appointments. And if they manage to secure a slot, they may not have a way to get to distant vaccination sites.

Ms. Oliver helps her neighbors snag appointments online and matches them with those willing to make the 45-minute drive to Livingston, the seat of Sumter County and the nearest town offering inoculations. Nearly three-quarters of the residents of the county, which includes Panola, are African-American.

“We’ve got to fend for ourselves because no one else is going to help us,” said Ms. Oliver, 68, a loquacious retired office administrator who spends many of her waking hours on the phone. “That’s the way it’s always been for poor Black people living in the country.”

Across the Southern states, Black doctors, Baptist preachers and respected community figures like Ms. Oliver are trying to combat lingering vaccine skepticism while also helping people overcome logistical hurdles that have led to a troubling disparity in vaccination rates between African-Americans and whites.

Though local leaders have made headway combating the hesitancy, they say the bigger obstacles are structural: the large stretches of Alabama and Mississippi without an internet connection or reliable cellphone service, the paucity of medical providers, and a medical establishment that has long overlooked the health care needs of African-Americans.

As it is, this region has some of the worst health outcomes in the country, and the coronavirus pandemic has disproportionately hit African-Americans, who have been dying at twice the rate of whites.

Alabama is one of the few states that does not require vaccine providers to report data on race, but health officials estimate that just 15 percent of the shots have gone to African-Americans, who make up 27 percent of Alabama’s population and 31 percent of all deaths from Covid-19. Whites, who make up 69 percent of residents, have received 54 percent of the vaccine supply, according to the state data, which is missing details on race for a quarter of vaccine recipients.

In Mississippi, 40 percent of Covid-19 deaths have occurred among African-Americans — a figure comparable to their portion of the population — but just 29 percent of the vaccines have gone to Black residents compared with 62 percent for whites, who make up nearly 60 percent of the state’s population.

The disparities have prompted a flurry of ad hoc organizing across the South that mirrors the increasingly robust get-out-the-vote efforts, which are aimed at surmounting state voting restrictions that critics say dampen minority turnout.

In Cleveland, Miss., Pam Chatman, a retired television journalist has been dispatching rented minibuses to ferry older residents to vaccination sites far from their rural homes. In nearby Greenville, the Rev. Thomas Morris uses his weekly Zoom sermons to assuage the concerns of vaccine skeptics — and then offers up church volunteers who book appointments for the flip phone set. And in central Alabama, Dr. John B. Waits, who oversees a constellation of nonprofit health clinics serving the poor, has been sending out mobile vaccinators to reach the homebound and the homeless.

“It’s all hands on deck because this is a life-and-death situation,” said Dr. Vernon A. Rayford, a pediatrician and internal medicine doctor in Tupelo, Miss. Dr. Rayford said he had been disappointed by the state’s reliance on a web-based appointment system and drive-through vaccination sites that are clustered in urban areas and white neighborhoods. Although those without internet access can call a state-run number for help booking appointments, many of his patients, he said, give up after spending long stretches on hold. Instead, he encourages them to call his wife, Themesha, who in recent weeks has made more than 100 online appointments on her laptop.

Since returning home to Tupelo eight years ago after a medical residency in Boston, Dr. Rayford said he had been frustrated by the dearth of health care options and entrenched poverty that saddles African-American residents with some of the highest rates of infant mortality, heart disease and diabetes in the country. Mississippi and Alabama are among the dozen states whose Republican-led governments have rejected Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act.

“Until we get a better system, we have to come up with these workarounds, but it gets really tiring,” Dr. Rayford said.

Public health experts say the $6 billion for community vaccination sites included in President Biden’s recently passed relief package will go a long way to addressing the problem, and officials in Mississippi and Alabama say they have made considerable progress over the past month in narrowing the racial gap in vaccinations. They say they are expanding vaccine distribution to community clinics and expect access to accelerate alongside increasing supplies of the vaccine made by Johnson & Johnson, which needs only one dose and can be kept at normal refrigeration temperatures, making it easier to distribute in rural areas.

(ed note) It's worth pointing out right here that every Republican voted against helping those communities. Every.Fucking.One.

Dr. Thomas Dobbs, Mississippi’s top health official, said 38 percent of all vaccines administered in the second week of March had gone to African-Americans, a milestone he said was accomplished with the help of local organizations. “The options are increasing very quickly and pretty soon people are not going to have to go to a drive-through site,” he said during a news conference last week.

Dr. Karen Landers, Alabama’s assistant state health officer, noted that last week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ranked Alabama among the top 10 states that have vaccinated vulnerable residents — a category that includes racial and ethnic minorities and the economically disadvantaged. But she added that the overwhelmingly rural composition of the state had made the task daunting given Alabama’s limited resources.

“We listen to the criticism, and we are certainly trying to take any elements of truth that are in that criticism so we can better serve our citizens,” Dr. Landers said in an interview.

Still, the logistical challenges remain stark in rural areas of the Deep South, where years of spending cutbacks and a lack of jobs have made life more difficult for the shrinking number of people left behind.

Frances Ford, a registered nurse, has been organizing vaccine appointments in Perry County, Ala., a largely African-American county of 10,000, just north of Selma, where more than a third of all households live in poverty. Ms. Ford, who runs the nonprofit organization Sowing Seeds of Hope, said many older residents were terrified of medical emergencies, even more so at night, given that there are just two ambulances to serve the county’s 720-square miles. The closest critical care hospital, in Tuscaloosa, is nearly 60 miles away.

Those who don’t drive and need routine medical care have to rely on a single van operated by the state to take them to dialysis appointments or to see a cardiologist.

“We’ve had car accidents where people waited two hours,” Ms. Ford said. She recalled watching in horror three years ago as a woman who had suffered a heart attack at a funeral died before she could get medical care.

The paucity of health care resources affects much of Alabama. Over the past decade, state budget cuts have led to a 35 percent reduction in staffing at county health departments: Nearly half of them have either one nurse on staff or none at all, according to Jim Carnes, policy director of the advocacy group Alabama Arise, citing internal state data.

“Our approach to rural health care has been shameful,” said Mr. Carnes, policy who has been pushing the state to make low-income homebound residents a top priority for vaccination.

Dr. Waits, the chief executive of Cahaba Medical Care, which runs 17 clinics in underserved communities across central Alabama, said the state’s ailing public health infrastructure and a severe shortage of health care professionals had made it harder to distribute vaccines to the rural poor. He added that state officials, chastened by news media accounts that have highlighted the racial disparities in vaccine distribution, had begun funneling more doses his way.

Dr. Waits is hiring 34 people to help with the logistics and paperwork needed to expand vaccinations — money Cahaba hopes to partially recoup through federal aid — but he says his clinics are still woefully understaffed. “We’ve got more vaccines then we can push out in a day,” he said. “I need more people, or I need money to hire more people.”

The lack of qualified vaccinators is also a problem in Sumter County, where Ms. Oliver, the convenience store owner, lives. The pharmacy nearest to Panola that offers vaccines, Livingston Drug, has a waiting list with 400 names. Unlike the nearby county health department, which dispenses vaccines one day a week, the pharmacy has a prodigious supply of vaccines but its owner, Zach Riley, is the only person on staff who can administer inoculations, which he does two dozen times a day between answering the phone, filling prescriptions, restocking the shelves.

“We’ve been flooded with calls but there’s only so much I can do I on my own,” he said before excusing himself to tend to Hasty Robinson, 73, who was coming in for her first dose after a monthlong wait. “At the rate we’re going, it might take until the end of August to get everyone vaccinated.”

After months of agitation by local elected officials, the state health authorities recently announced that they would use the National Guard to stage a mass vaccination event at a park in Livingston. For Drucilla Russ-Jackson, 72, an African-American district leader in Sumter County, it was a vindication of her efforts to prod the state into action. Armed with a stack of fliers, she spent much of last week navigating the county’s rutted back roads to reach constituents spread across the cotton fields and the pine forests.

At the M&M Market, one of the few gas stations in the area, she strong-armed customers like James Cunningham, 71, a retired truck driver who doesn’t own a cellphone or a computer, and who lives with his 87-year-old mother.

“To be honest, I didn’t even know where to begin,” he said of his reaction after Ms. Russ-Jackson told him about the one-day vaccination juggernaut, which was scheduled for the following Tuesday, on March 23.

The event, it turns out, illustrates the difficulty of the mission. At the end of the day, more than half of the 1,100 doses were left unused. Ms. Russ-Jackson said turnout might have been dampened by the rain. Or perhaps it was the resistance of older residents, scarred by the government-run Tuskegee syphilis experiments in eastern Alabama.

Or maybe it was the drive-through vaccination site, given that the state had not arranged transportation for those without cars.

“To be honest, we need to bring these vaccines out to the people and I’m going to be asking the state to do that,” Ms. Russ-Jackson said with a sigh. “We’re making progress, but we still have a long way to go.”

in the meantime

Eat Your Veggies

YouTuber CC Marie with a dissertation on Christian Dominionism.

Podcast

I reserve the right to bitch about it.

Mail a check payable to:

The Professional Left Podcast

PO Box 9133

Springfield, IL 62791-9133

COVID-19 Update

World

New Cases:   630,204 (⬆︎ .50%)
New Deaths:    11,625 (⬆︎ .42%)

USA

New Cases:    76,976 (⬆︎ .25%)
New Deaths:     1,289 (⬆︎ .23%)

Vaccination Scorecard

Total Vaccinations:            89.6 million (⬆︎ 2.63%)
Total Eligible Population:  33.5%
Total Population:               27.0%

Confirming what we've known for a long time, plus a look at a coupla things we haven't heard much about - like the futility of just throwing money at a problem and hoping it'll all filter through to the right places as if by magic.

Reuters:

U.S. COVID response could have avoided hundreds of thousands of deaths: research

The United States squandered both money and lives in its response to the coronavirus pandemic, and it could have avoided nearly 400,000 deaths with a more effective health strategy and trimmed federal spending by hundreds of billions of dollars while still supporting those who needed it.

That is the conclusion of a group of research papers released at a Brookings Institution conference this week, offering an early and broad start to what will likely be an intense effort in coming years to assess the response to the worst pandemic in a century.

U.S. COVID-19 fatalities could have stayed under 300,000, versus a death toll of 540,000 and rising, if by last May the country had adopted widespread mask, social distancing, and testing protocols while awaiting a vaccine, estimated Andrew Atkeson, economics professor at University of California, Los Angeles.

He likened the state-by-state, patchwork response to a car’s cruise control. As the virus worsened people hunkered down, but when the situation improved restrictions were dropped and people were less careful, with the result that “the equilibrium level of daily deaths ... remains in a relatively narrow band” until the vaccine arrived.

Atkeson projected a final fatality level of around 670,000 as vaccines spread and the crisis subsides. The outcome, had no vaccine been developed, would have been a far-worse 1.27 million, Atkeson estimated.

The economic response, while mammoth, also could have been better tailored, argued University of California, Berkeley economics professor Christine Romer. She joins former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers and several others from the last two Democratic administrations in criticizing the spending authorized since last spring, including the Biden team’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan.

While she said the federal government’s more than $5 trillion in pandemic-related spending won’t likely trigger a fiscal crisis, she worries that higher-priority investments will be deferred because of allocations to initiatives like the Paycheck Protection Program.

Those forgivable small business loans were “an interesting and noble experiment,” but were also “problematic on many levels,” including an apparent cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars for each job saved, she said.

“Spending on programs such as unemployment compensation and public heath was exactly what was called for,” she wrote, but other aspects, particularly the generous one-time payments to families, were “largely ineffective and wasteful.”

“If something like the $1 trillion spent on stimulus payments that did little to help those most affected by the pandemic ends up precluding spending $1 trillion on infrastructure or climate change in the next few years, the United States will have made a very bad bargain indeed,” Romer wrote.

Biden administration officials, including Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, argue the full package was needed to be sure all workers and families are kept economically intact until the job market recovers.

In a separate paper, Minneapolis Federal Reserve researchers Krista Ruffini and Abigail Wozniak concluded the federal programs largely did what they intended by supporting income and spending, with the impact seen in how consumption changed in response to the approval and lapse of different government payments.

But they also found room for improvement.

Evidence of the PPP’s effectiveness in job retention, for example, was “mixed,” they found, and increases in food assistance didn’t account for things like higher grocery prices.

“Food insecurity remained elevated throughout 2020,” they noted.

The aim now, they said, should be on determining what worked in order to make the response to any similar crisis more effective.

“The 2020 social insurance system response had many successes,” they said. “Given the scope and scale of the pandemic response, it is critical we continue to evaluate these efforts to understand the full extent of their reach, which populations were helped, who was left out.”