Science

Joel Wertheimer Has Good News

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Joel Wertheimer is an attorney and former Obama official I do not know. I don’t follow him on Twitter. I don’t use Twitter, so I don’t follow anyone on the platform.

Judging him by his optimistic post about COVID deaths last week, it appears that he is one of those polished Obama centrists (with a black and white headshot, even). who feels that people like me, who mask, get vaccinated and avoid indoor public places, are just as bad as those who spread lies about SARS-CoV-2, oppose vaccines, and downplay the pandemic while their peers die. I could be incorrect. But let’s dive into his tweet.

First, a disclaimer: The lack of engagement in his post below is an indication that we’re all done with the pandemic. I acknowledge that. But the pandemic is not done with us. And that is why I feel this urge to point out the ludicrousness of his tweet, which was re-tweeted by the usually outstanding Chris Hayes.

Here is the tweet, since I don’t think Hayes re-tweeted the others:

Objectively, this is good news. I wouldn’t call it great. But it is good. It shows the winter wave of COVID-19 cases is ending. There’s just one small thing. Some states have stopped reporting COVID-19 deaths to the CDC, beginning with Iowa. Now I am not saying that Iowa is hiding hundreds of deaths from the chart above. But the CDC reporting is no longer any good.

I have resisted and resisted this throughout the pandemic, but I now admit that we can no longer think of the US fighting the pandemic as a single nation. The war against the virus started regionally, expanded nationally, but quickly broke-up again into regions, and then states. In the vast American west, big counties show us the COVID flare-ups. Fine. I will stay in my lane going forward, which is New York State.

So let’s have a look at New York State. My state reports weekly deaths to the CDC, but doesn’t post a summary for the public on its COVID dashboard. Instead, that data is available in the DIY open source data section of the site. Now I’m not saying that I don’t have the patience to create my own report. Wait, I am saying that.

So in lieu of new deaths, the only thing we New Yorkers can easily see is daily hospitalizations, which is a great metric. As of yesterday (April 26), New York state had 72 patients in ICUs and under 800 hospitalized with COVID, with the vast majority of those patients in New York City.

And this too, is objectively good news. New York state hasn’t had fewer than 100 patients in the ICU since July 2021. This is a near record low. But it’s accurate and relevant to point out that before the pandemic, if we saw 72 patients in state ICUs with Influenza in April, we would say that this is a harsh flu season.

But this brings me to Wertheimer’s next tweet. And this is what got me fuming:

He’s absolutely correct about one thing. People should not be looking at testing numbers at this point. There’s no blanket testing being done. For example, patients going in for surgery are no longer tested. So we should focus on the hospitalizations. But is it “just getting better”? That’s where I have a problem.

And the simple explanation of the problem I have is this. It’s April. It shouldn't be this bad in April - unless there’s a pandemic going on. There is, right?

So going back to the CDC dashboard, which is incomplete and therefore inaccurate, it reports that last week, the US saw 1160 COVID-19 deaths. In any recent pre-pandemic year this century, that would be regarded as a very high number of deaths from a viral respiratory illness. And that is why we can’t scientifically declare the pandemic over in the US.

Here’s what I often think about. What if we settle where we are currently? What if the US officially loses 1100 people each week, and New York state has between 50 and 80 people in ICUs now through December? Well, we know what would come next. There would be a winter surge of infections, hospitalizations and deaths from January through March 2024. We would see a repeat of late 2022 and the whole of 2023.

My writing this does not mean that I want the pandemic to go on forever. I am not cheering for the virus. And I am not denying that fewer people are dying. I saw what 5,000 ICU patients in New York City looks like a little more than 3 years ago. I know things are better. But what if this is as good as it gets going forward? What if July 2021 and the summer of 2023 are brief brushes with a COVID-free nation? What if the really big drops in deaths only happen in summertime? What if, for only a few weeks each summer, we get close to a definitive end of the pandemic, and then it revs up again?

Before the pandemic, COVID-19 wasn’t a cause of death. We can agree on that, right?

So what exactly is Wertheimer saying in the next tweet?

How can any scientist, doctor, public health professional or policymaker be satisfied with COVID-19 settling to become the third leading cause of death? Let’s suppose, in an alternate history, we were dealing with COVID-19 for decades. It would still present as a big problem each winter when Americans socialize indoors. We would have elected leaders and scientists telling us to get vaccinated each fall to reduce the risk of death. How many Americans recognized that and got a booster last fall? Oh, about 18%, plus or minus. We went from nearly 80% vaccinated in early 2021 to under 20% vaccinated for the winter of 2023. Like a film that sees a huge drop in box office revenue in its second week, the vaccines are no longer desired. And now the US is stuck in this unnecessary vulnerable position with people socializing indoors each winter, assuming they never have to get another shot for this disease. They are done with it. Wertheimer added:

Correct! And I think Wertheimer knows this, but 80,000 respiratory infection deaths per year would, in normal times, be the worst flu season since the 1910s. However, this is the pandemic that we’re done with. We’re over it. Don’t wanna read or hear about it. We’re done. Which brings me to a tweet under his I didn’t want to cite, but now I’m angry:

[In my Martin Scorsese voice] NoNoNoNoNo.

There’s no equivalency between people like me, who advocate masking, avoid dining indoors, and promote booster shots, and the hordes of troublemakers, liars, grifters, domestic terrorists and conspiracy cultists who claim that masks make people sick, vaccines kill people, and COVID deaths are wildly exaggerated.

I think Joel Wertheimer knows that. He didn’t like nor agree with that reply to one of his COVID tweets. But then again, I did start this post with the assumption that Wertheimer is tired of people like me who remind him that we’re still in a pandemic, and maybe it’s not a good idea to drink and dine indoors in bars and restaurants. YOLO and stuff, but this disease sucks. If if you catch it more than once, there’s a really good chance it will ruin your health as you age. It’s an exotic animal disease, people.

In conclusion, what we've been seeing for the last 1152 days or so is a massive struggle over the seriousness of this pandemic. From the start -from the very start- we have not been at war with a virus, but at war with ourselves. (The scientists, of course are at war with viruses, so I am setting them aside for a moment.) The majority knew the disease was scary, deadly and something to be avoided. And the studies and data are proving that pro-science side to be correct. The other side, a loud, occasionally violent minority, has been yelling that the pandemic isn’t so bad, or isn’t real.

But something terrible happened. Over time, the majority stopped defending their position. They began to give-in to the cries, shouts and threats from the minority. They reluctantly re-opened the restaurants and the theaters. Then they gave-in to the demands to stop promoting mask wearing. And then they did the unthinkable. They stopped promoting the vaccines. They just gave-up and made themselves move past the pandemic. And that’s how we saw the current vaccination rate plummet by 60 points. A cultural war with real life and death consequences was fought and the anti-science minority won. Sound familiar? This is precisely how the minority is winning in taking away rights to bodily autonomy and free speech in schools. It is also how the minority got us to stop trying to prevent our environmental catastrophe. They yelled us out of the room.

The pandemic will have long lasting effects on humanity. Just today, the WHO acknowledged that data shows that as many as 10% of people who survived COVID-19 develop long-term chronic conditions, which will almost certainly shorten lifespans, harm economies, and put a lot of strain on the global healthcare and health sciences industry. And this will go on for decades.

But, sure. Yes, Twitter user Loaf Management, we who follow the science are just as bad as those who claimed that the pandemic was being exaggerated, embellished and used to scare the public for whatever reasons the anti-semitic conspiracy cultists could think of.

Republicans Want Us All Dead In The Next Pandemic

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And so do Democrats.

The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic is still active. It has been following a pattern over the last 16 months. In most nations, the waves if infections and deaths have decreased a little with each wave. While the deaths each week in the US have been among the highest in the world, the last three winters show that the pandemic might be a few months or maybe another full northern hemisphere winter away from ending. The US was losing over 20,000 people per week in January 2021, when the vaccine rollout was in its first weeks. That number dropped to 10,000 deaths per week a year later. And it fell further to 4,000 dead per week in 2023.

There is one nagging problem, however. The US has been losing between 2,000 and 4,000 people each week for a year now. Note that last week, the official death count dropped below 2,000 for the first time since July 2021. If this week’s numbers are also below 2,000, then we will have a new official low for US weekly deaths. But back to my point, take a look at the weekly totals over the last 11.5 months:

Centers For Disease Control

To me that means two things. First, it means that the vast majority of Americans have stopped masking. Second, the majority of Americans have not gotten a COVID-19 booster. That means their vaccine-induced immunity has worn off.

And it is here where I think I must pause and address these amazing mRNA vaccines. There are millions of Americans who are wasting their lives attacking drugs that are among the safest in world history. They say the vaccines kill people. They don’t. They then say that the vaccines are ineffective. That’s also a lie. The vaccines are designed to be annual, like a flu shot. And if hospitals, offices and public employers simply mandated annual vaccines for both influenza and COVID-19, then we’d be in a much better place as a nation. But too many people complained, and complained loudly. Rather than drive the message home that the vaccines are meant to be given annually, the FDA, CDC and NIAID all backed away from the vaccines in 2022 and didn’t promote them anymore. They were so afraid of confrontation with the far right, that our own government couldn’t be bothered to educate the public about the vaccines that intelligent Americans were practically fighting over less than 2 years prior.

I will say this until I stop breathing: the mRNA vaccines are amazing. They are a technological and pharmaceutical wonder. They work in preventing COVID-related deaths for most people who take them. And like flu shots they help older Americans live longer. The fact that the vaccines don’t prevent transmission is not proof of failure. It’s just that Americans are woefully uneducated at baseline and further misinformed by their news media. Too many people were led to believe that the first versions of the vaccines would be the only shots they would need to protect themselves against SARS-CoV-2. And when scientists try to explain that this is not correct, and try to adjust expectations, Americans quit fighting the virus. It was the fastest and biggest mass quitting I’ve ever seen.

And so, as of March 2023, the US has decided that it is fully done with this SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19 thing. For real this time. Who cares is there are still 50 cases per 100,000 people? Furthermore, we don’t know the positivity rate anyway as we stopped testing. As we enter the fourth Spring with the pandemic, the USA is out of the fight. I actually think the US was over this a year ago, around March 2022. I could sense it when the crowds at Knicks games went from being 80% masked to under 10% masked almost overnight in early 2022 as news reports about the Omicron variants died down. Next thing we knew, cruises were sailing again, bars were full, and some fools paid real money to see Top Gun: Maverick in movie theaters by Memorial Day.

Politically, it is clear that the GOP was in denial about the pandemic from the start, and by 2022, virtually all pandemic policies were gone. And that’s not all. To this day, the GOP is furious -FURIOUS!!- about a pandemic it has denied for years. The GOP wants confirmation that the virus was released from a Wuhan laboratory. The GOP wants Dr. Anthony Fauci to spend the last 10 years of his life in solitary confinement. The GOP wants retribution against the New Yorkers and scientists who told the nation that mask wearing was the best way to stop the spread of SARS-CoV-2. For a party that wanted to be over the pandemic in the summer of 2020, the GOP sure isn’t acting like they are over it. They might never get over it, so long as their manufactured outrage motivates their voters.

Indeed, one only needs to look at right wing media and Twitter to see this in action. To this day, the Right is raging about lockdowns in 2020, which were never strictly enforced. Every state in the US allowed food and liquor shops to remain open throughout the pandemic. There was a half-assed attempt to stop the spread. Had everyone in the USA stayed inside their houses for 2-4 weeks, we would have stopped the pandemic dead in its tracks. But that is not what happened. Half of this nation disregarded guidance to stay home and mask-up when shopping for necessary items. And now those very same disruptive, loud idiots are still yelling that they were harmed by “lockdowns” that they didn’t participate in. The 2020 Sturgis Rally is a prime example. Around the same time, Godfather Pizza founder and former GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain died of COVID-19 after repeated appearances at indoor events. This nation had a massive surge of deaths both just before and just after the rollout of lifesaving vaccines. The right yelled about the virus. Then they yelled about the lockdowns. Then they yelled about the vaccine. Now they are yelling about all those things, in a desperate attempt to rally Republican voters to punish the “libs” who gave a damn about public health and American lives.

But here is the bigger news: those “libs” no longer give a damn themselves. Democrats have gone along with the right wing revolt against public health. They have stopped talking about masks and vaccines. Democrats have declared the pandemic over since 2022 and they will make it official in May. I think it’s fair to say that Democrats are now against public health and against efforts to stop respiratory diseases. When it comes to disease, Democrats are just as bad as the GOP. One only needs to look at the words and deeds of New York City mayor Eric Adams as an example. The vaccines, which only provide protection against serious disease for 5 to 9 months, have been quietly dropped by both corporate and public employers. The backlash against vaccines is so strong, it’s a forgone conclusion that Americans will not line up for shots ever again. At least not in this lifetime. The only people who will get annual shots of any kind will be either educated people who give a damn, or people who work in large hospitals.

In sum, all of this means that we are not going to respond well to the next pandemic. The next pandemic will likely be the result of another SARS/coronavirus. Perhaps next time, many millions will die, not just 3 million. And as I have said before, I don’t care how many die next time. I simply don’t. This is not the opinion of a madman. This is simply the logical response to a nation that has totally gone mad.

We New Yorkers Are Fools

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Yesterday, Mayor Eric Adams dropped this executive order on the heads of New York City residents. Somehow, it insults both the vaccinated and the unvaccinated. We're all fools. We've been so stupid, for different reasons.

The people who were ignorant, foolish, and reckless are those who refused the COVID-19 vaccine. They now see, a little over a year later, that our leaders carve out exceptions for entertainers and "performers." Any city employee who was involuntarily terminated for refusing vaccines (without a health exemption) now has grounds to file lawsuits.

And then there's the slap in the face to the majority of us, who got vaccines. We waited in long lines. We did our part to take pressure off of hospitals, and give society a chance to smother this raging fire. We trusted the medicine, as these vaccines (aside from J&J) were the most researched and tested vaccines in history. But here we are, a year later, with a mayor who basically just told us that our getting vaccinated to fight the world's first pandemic in 101 years was for nothing. Silly us. COVID-19 is just the flu. Anyone still advocating for vaccines and masking is now a raving crazy person. Since 2021 I have been told by strangers to “seek professional help” because I have been stressing the need for good people to get vaccinated and wear a mask.

The pandemic rages on, but Mayor Adams has declared it over. Throughout the press conference video above, he referred to the pandemic has having occurred in the past. The vaccines that the majority of us worked hard to get as early as possible are now just an option, like the flu shot. The only people who are getting vaccinated going forward are people who want to stay ahead of variants with boosters, children when they reach the minimum vaccination age, or college bound teenagers who realize that flu shots and the COVID-19 vaccine protect their interests to stay healthy.

The ongoing SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has killed between 6 and 18 million people, depending on which research methodology you choose. Millions of deaths should have made the vaccines mandatory for decades -generations, even. Instead, millions of deaths only led to the COVID-19 vaccines being mandatory for just under a year. Just under a year of fighting something no one alive has ever seen before, and requires a lot more than a year to defeat. Never mind, say our leaders. Just kidding, you fools! Get back to NBA playoff games and dining indoors. Get back to what’s important.

There will almost certainly be another respiratory disease pandemic in this century. When it hits, there will be PPE, vaccines and anti-virial medications to save lives. But none of it will be mandatory. None of it will be free, either. Theaters will stay open. Airlines will keep flying. Bars and restaurants will carry on. In the next pandemic, it will be every sucker for themselves. And millions of Americans who choose not to limit their exposure will die.

Mayor Adams let his friends in the entertainment industry set public health policy. I'd say "shame," but he has no concept of it.

We're Surely Doomed

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This is a post about climate change. But it is also about pandemics, as we are now living thorough a major pandemic.

My argument is simple. We are all doomed. And I don’t have to go far outside of Congress to make my case.

Here is US Senator Mike Lee, denying climate change, and also advocating that we make the problem worse by reproducing more.

Logic would dictate that if a government accepted the fact that burning coal and other fossil fuels had to stop, they would adjust their policies to discourage consumption. In fact, they would have started to change their policies in 1990, with the groundbreaking, first IPCC report. But instead, the governments of the world -both democracies and autocracies- subsidize the fossil fuel industry to the tune of $5 Trillion annually.

Human-driven climate change has irreversible effects, such as the acceleration of species extinction, which in turn threatens human life further.

And what threatens human life further are governments that deny the science and do not govern. That is the contemporary GOP in a nutshell. Since the Reagan era, they have been destroying our nation and the world. The Trump administration simply denies the science and dismantles the government offices charged with tracking threats to human existence.

Which brings us to the Trump administration’s utter and unforgivable incompetence in failing to keep this nation prepared for a deadly pandemic. By my casual count, COVID-19 is the fifth major viral pandemic of the 21st century, and the first one that will kill a significant number of Americans.

Here is Congressman Matt Gaetz wearing a gas mask on the House floor, mocking the pandemic as well as violating the rules that prohibit costumes and being a general asshat.

And here is how the US president reacted in the first month the virus was in our nation.

Before thousands of Americans die due to COVID-19, here is a new defining moment for the Trump presidency. It isn’t my fault. It wasn’t me. I didn’t know.

Today, our president took some more questions. They start at 10:47 in this video. His lies are more transparent than ever. He acts like a child who’d been caught doing something bad. And then explains that his handshakes and touching is expected from a tough guy like him. Someone has to touch the microphones. I expect his test to come back positive tonight.