Six on History: The 'Rona Still
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"Life in the US in Jan-Feb 2022 is going to be almost unrecognizable to most Americans. Even the people who have managed to pretend Covid-19 wasn’t happening are about to get a major wakeup call. When we call 911 & no one comes, when we literally cannot enter the ER for crowds. . . .
When we go to grocery stores & find shelves empty, to pharmacies & find them closed because every single employee is out sick themselves or tending to a loved one. Please get what you need to look after your household. Fill prescriptions, get over the counter meds & staples. . . .
As much as I hate it (and I really do, I’m a mom of 3 kids who had virtual school from Mar ‘20 til Sept ‘21), the idea that schools will manage to stay open in any meaningful way in Jan is a joke. Staffing issues alone will close them. Prepare for major disruption in Jan ‘22. MAJOR. Start thinking now about how you can help your family, friends, neighbors—w/ supplies, w/ skills, w/ knowledge — & vice versa because we are deep trouble if we don’t go all in as a community of helpers for what is coming.
This won’t last forever. I promise. But Jan & Feb 2022 are going to be very dangerous & difficult. All the things you can ordinarily count on, you won’t be able to count on.”
Today is January 10. 911 services are still working, and the overwhelming majority of businesses around the country are still open and working. (Also, those businesses are probably hiring.) It is not doomsday or the early scenes of an apocalyptic movie happening outside your window. This morning, 78.2 percent of the country’s hospital beds are being used, and 80.9 percent of the country’s ICU beds are being used. Those figures are actually down a bit from a few days ago.
But if we aren’t living through the near-apocalyptic vision of Dr. Prowell — at least not yet — we are seeing a lot of complications, headaches, and inconveniences related to Omicron piling up, as the Associated Press detailed:
Ambulances in Kansas speed toward hospitals then suddenly change direction because hospitals are full. Employee shortages in New York City cause delays in trash and subway services and diminish the ranks of firefighters and emergency workers. Airport officials shut down security checkpoints at the biggest terminal in Phoenix and schools across the nation struggle to find teachers for their classrooms.
The current explosion of omicron-fueled coronavirus infections in the U.S. is causing a breakdown in basic functions and services — the latest illustration of how COVID-19 keeps upending life more than two years into the pandemic.
Medical facilities have been hit by a “double whammy,” he said. The number of COVID-19 patients at the University of Kansas Hospital rose from 40 on Dec. 1 to 139 on Friday. At the same time, more than 900 employees have been sickened with COVID-19 or are awaiting test results — 7 percent of the hospital’s 13,500-person workforce.
It’s a similar story in a Wall Street Journal report about various U.S. hospitals, in which the number of beds available is shrinking because so many hospital workers have caught Omicron themselves. Those hospital workers are not in life-threatening condition, but they are either too sick to come in to work or cannot safely work around patients until the infection passes:
Staff shortages prompted the Mass General Brigham hospital system in Boston to keep 83 beds empty on Friday. The University Hospitals system in Ohio has closed as many as 16 percent of its intensive-care beds recently, while Parkland Health & Hospital System in Dallas has shut 30 of 900 beds. [The hospital they took JFK's body to 11/22/63]
“It’s definitely a brutal situation,” said Dr. Joseph Chang, chief medical officer at Parkland, which had more than 500 out of 1,400 employees out sick one recent day. . . .
Members of the Association of American Medical Colleges, a trade group for medical schools and teaching hospitals, report that 5 percent to 7 percent of employees are out sick with Covid-19, said Janis Orlowski, the association’s chief health care officer.
“Those are big numbers when you’re talking about staffing a hospital,” Dr. Orlowski said.
Amidst this labor shortage, New York governor Kathy Hochul wants to fire any health-care worker who hasn’t gotten a booster. Hochul announced on Friday that “all covered health care workers previously required to receive a COVID-19 vaccination under the Department’s August 26th Emergency regulation must also now receive a COVID-19 booster dose within two weeks of becoming eligible, absent a valid medical exemption. Consistent with the August 26th Emergency Regulation, there is no test-out option.”
This new edict probably won’t see the wave of firings and dismissals that the vaccine requirement did, but it still seems spectacularly counterproductive for the state to be telling hospitals to fire employees during a surge of patients and a shortage of workers. Yes, it would be preferable if all health-care workers were boosted, and the percentage of workers who are vaccinated but not boosted is probably small. But as many of the vaccinated and boosted are learning, vaccinations and boosters don’t stop you from getting infected. As Dan McLaughlin observed on Friday, “The entire conceptual framework of unvaccinated people being a risk to the vaccinated is obsolete with the Omicron variant, which spreads with as much ease between vaccinated people as unvaccinated.”
On the Wall Street Journal op-ed page, Dr. Luc Montagnier, a winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovering the human immunodeficiency virus, and Jed Rubenfeld, a constitutional scholar, argue that the circumstances used to justify vaccine mandates don’t exist anymore:
As of Jan. 1, Omicron represented more than 95 percent of U.S. Covid cases, according to estimates from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Because some of Omicron’s 50 mutations are known to evade antibody protection, because more than 30 of those mutations are to the spike protein used as an immunogen by the existing vaccines, and because there have been mass Omicron outbreaks in heavily vaccinated populations, scientists are highly uncertain the existing vaccines can stop it from spreading. As the CDC put it on Dec. 20, “we don’t yet know . . . how well available vaccines and medications work against it.”
Prowell predicted that, “The idea that schools will manage to stay open in any meaningful way in January is a joke,” and . . . that prediction is turning out to be a little too close to reality for comfort. Not every school in every community is struggling to stay open, but a lot of schools are wondering how many teachers and students can stay home sick before the whole endeavor isn’t worthwhile.
The Washington Post lays out the numbers:
At least 5,225 schools were disrupted for at least part of this past week because of the pandemic, easily a record for the current school year, according to the data firm Burbio. Public schools in Atlanta and Detroit went completely virtual this week, while others, including in the D.C. suburbs of Montgomery County, Md., and Philadelphia, are making decisions on a school-by-school or class-by-class basis. Chicago Public Schools has shut down altogether because of failed union talks over coronavirus safety measures. And day cares around the country are closing for weeks at a time because of coronavirus outbreaks, worsening a long-simmering child-care crisis.
In a better, more reasonable country, school administrators could say, “We’ve got X percent of teachers out sick, and we’ve got Y percent of students out sick, and it’s almost impossible to get any real education done in these circumstances. We’re going to end up with two weeks of substitute teachers playing educational videos in front of half-empty classrooms. We’re going to switch to virtual learning and online classes for the next two weeks, and everybody will come back, full-time, on January 24” or whatever circumstances fit. But parents would revolt, with good reason, because the last time we were told that schools would “close for two weeks in response to the continued spread of novel coronavirus, or COVID-19,” schools remained closed for at least a year. School administrators who dragged their feet in reopening — because the teachers’ unions apparently hate having their members show up for work anymore — wasted their trust and goodwill.
Speaking of squandered trust and goodwill, managing the Omicron variant is difficult enough without an administration and public-health leaders who keep saying the wrong things. This morning, Axios quoted a bunch of doctors and public-health experts who contend that the federal health agencies, particularly the CDC, may be squandering their credibility with usually receptive Americans. Dr. Leana Wen, CNN talking head and the former president of Planned Parenthood, offered the harshest assessment: “The CDC is facing a real crisis of trust. The primary problem is the policy and how insular [director Rochelle] Walensky has been in setting it. She and the others are great communicators, but no one can communicate a bad policy.”
I’m not so sure Walensky counts as a “great communicator.” This weekend on Fox News Sunday, Bret Baier tossed her a softball, giving her multiple opportunities to rebuke and correct Supreme Court justice Sonia Sotomayor’s otherworldly contention that, “We have over 100,000 children, which we’ve never had before, in serious condition and many on ventilators.” But it was like pulling teeth; Walensky clearly had no interest in speaking any critical word of Sotomayor, even though the justice was talking nonsense and wildly exaggerating the virus’s risk to children.
Walensky also said that it would take several weeks to determine “how many of the 836,000 deaths in the U.S. linked to Covid are from Covid or how many are with Covid.” That’s an important distinction! How is it that the CDC doesn’t have, at minimum, a ballpark figure for that?
ADDENDA: In case you missed it yesterday, the Washington Post’s editorial board wants to institute mandatory national vaccine passports, which you would be required to show to go to school, use public transportation, or attend indoor events. Also, it wants to rebuild trust in public-health institutions. Strangely, it doesn’t even seem to recognize that the lack of trust in public-health institutions makes enacting mandatory national vaccine passports impossible.
(It is also unconstitutional, as Charlie Cooke reminds us. But I am struck by the absurdity of the thought process that concludes, “We have to enact a ‘papers, please’ regime that will fundamentally alter American life and force Americans to regularly provide health information wherever they go, and THEN we need to restore public faith in the people enacting this policy.”)
Up in New York City, they’re still running public-service announcements urging people to go get tested for Covid-19 “immediately if you have symptoms, and before and after travel and gatherings.” I guess these commercials were taped back when people could find Covid tests on store shelves, huh?
If you had an easy time getting a booster, good for you. I went looking for an appointment for my older son Saturday morning on the Vaccine Administration Management System and found that every site in a 50-mile radius was booked up until Monday. Occasionally, a particular site would say appointments were available, but then when I clicked through, it would say that no appointments were available until Monday. We ended up just driving around to pharmacies, and the second one we went to, in a Safeway supermarket, said they could fit us in. This weekend, a lot of people seemed to think the point of the story is that Jim is a Nervous Nellie or Jim is exaggerating the difficulty of finding a booster shot. No, the point is that two years into a pandemic, we’re still being told to use glitchy websites that do not accurately say which places actually can give people vaccines on a particular day."
"By the time Cheryl Cosey learned she had COVID-19, she had gone three days without dialysis — a day and a half more than she usually waited between appointments. She worried how much longer she could wait before going without her life-saving treatments would kill her.
Her COVID-19 diagnosis in the pandemic’s first weeks, after she’d been turned away from a dialysis facility because of a fever, meant Cosey was battling two potentially fatal diseases. But even she didn’t know how dangerous the novel coronavirus was to her weakened immune system.
Had she realized the risks, she would have had her daughter Shardae Lovelady move in. Just the two of them in Cosey’s red brick home on Chicago’s West Side, looking out at the world through the sliding glass door in the living room, leaving only for her dialysis.
After Cosey’s positive test in April 2020, Lovelady had to take her mother to a facility that treated patients with suspected or confirmed COVID-19. The facility fit her in for one of its last appointments the next day.
At that point, Cosey had gone more than four days without dialysis.
Four hours later, after Cosey completed her treatment, Lovelady returned to the nearly deserted building to bring her mother home, the sun having long disappeared from the sky. Cosey, dressed in a sweater and a green spring jacket, was disoriented, her breathing sporadic.
Alone with her mother on the sidewalk, Lovelady ran inside to ask workers for help getting Cosey out of her wheelchair and into her car.
“They offered no assistance,” Lovelady said. “They treated her as though she was an infection.”
(A spokesperson for the facility said employees aren’t allowed to help patients once they leave, for safety reasons.)
As Lovelady waited for paramedics to arrive, she grabbed a blanket from her car to wrap around her mother.
“My mother has COVID. I know she has COVID, but I didn’t care,” Lovelady said. “I hugged her and just held on until the ambulance came.”
Then she followed the flashing lights to the hospital.
The New Year began with the Covid-19 pandemic continuing its outbreak. Omicron is highly contagious, but seems less deadly than its predecessor, the Delta variant. Some experts and policymakers hope to achieve some form of herd immunity, but disagreements persist.
Heng has been drawing for the Lianhe Zaobao newspaper, Singapore's largest daily, since 1984. He also works for other Asian newspapers and his cartoons are published in several international newspapers. In 1998, he won the first prize in a contest organised by the UN as part of ESCAP (Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific). In 2000, he received the "Grafica Internazionale Award" at the international festival of political satire in Italy."
"At the entrance to the Lowe’s in a central Ohio strip mall, a bright blue-and-white sign tells customers that, under local ordinances, they must wear a face covering inside. Next door, at Hale’s Ales & Kitchen, a sign asks customers to please be patient with a staff shortage — with no mention of masks.
The city line between Columbus and suburban Hilliard crosses right through the strip mall, Mill Run Square. In Columbus, where the Lowe’s Home Improvement Store lies, the city council early in the coronavirus pandemic created a mask requirement that remains in place. In Hilliard, where Hales is located, the city council has not imposed a mask rule, despite entreaties from the top county health official as coronavirus cases spiked.
“We’ve not been able to put in place the policy that would protect our community,” Mazzola said.
The number of states that have passed laws similar to Ohio’s is proliferating fast, from eight identified in one study in May to more than double that many as of last month, according to an analysis by Temple University’s Center for Public Health Law Research. And around the country, many more measures are being debated or being prepared for legislative sessions to start early in the new year.
A new Indiana law gives city councils and county commissions power to overrule local health officials if their efforts to tame the pandemic are more stringent than rules in effect statewide. Tennessee lawmakers have taken away health officials’ ability to decide whether public schools should be closed in an emergency, giving that authority to school boards while also allowing the governor to order all schools to teach students in person.
And in Arkansas, a statute forbids any state or local official from compelling masks. As the delta variant was racing around in August, the state’s Republican governor, Asa Hutchinson, said he regretted the measure and summoned legislators into a special session to rethink it. The law stayed in place.
Over the decades, critics have sought to persuade lawmakers to soften or remove safety measures, such as tobacco regulations, or requirements to wear seat belts or motorcycle helmets.
“But for them to go after the basis of public health authority is pretty new,” said Georges C. Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association.
Health officials say the new laws, targeted at coronavirus-fighting strategies, often carry unintended consequences stretching far beyond the pandemic to thwart health departments'’ longtime roles, such as maintaining food safety.
Researchers and health officials also predict such laws will get in the way of dealing with future health crises of unforeseen origin. But as the coronavirus pandemic persists, with omicron having arrived as the most transmissible variant so far, the laws’ impact already is clear.
In May, Montana, which has several new statutes narrowing health officials’ powers, became the first state to prohibit discrimination based on vaccination status. It applies to any vaccine, not just shots to protect against the coronavirus. It means that employers may ask staff members whether they have been immunized against the virus, but they cannot punish or lay off employees who refuse to disclose their vaccination status or to get the shots. It makes an exception for nursing homes — but not for hospitals or clinics.
Community members staged protests. With the law imminent, Benefis backed off its mandate, according to health-care experts in the state. Benefis declined to comment on its decision.
For all 62 hospitals in the state, the law creates a bind, according to Rich Rasmussen, president of the Montana Hospital Association.
The state’s restrictions collide with what the federal government is ordering hospitals to do. The Department of Health and Human Services created a rule that hospitals and other health facilities with patients insured through Medicare or Medicaid must require their employees to have had at least a first coronavirus shot by Dec. 5.
A standoff has been averted for now, because two federal courts in November temporarily blocked the HHS requirement as part of lawsuits objecting to the federal rule. Meanwhile, a health system, a few doctors’ practices, several patients and the Montana Medical Association have filed their own lawsuit trying to restore the ability of hospitals and other health providers to compel workers to be vaccinated.
Montana’s hospitals argue they must be able to provide safe environments for their workers and patients.
“If you are providing care to neonates, you want to ensure everyone … is vaccinated,” Rasmussen said.
Many Montana employers hold a different view.
But he said, “If I’d asked my staff [to be vaccinated], half my employees would have quit. … Individual rights in Montana are very important to people.”
The political moves against vaccine requirements are spreading. Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee (R) in November signed a law that forbids employers from requiring workers, job applicants or customers to prove they have been vaccinated. Six days later, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) signed four bills that prohibit employers and educational institutions from requiring workers or students to be vaccinated against the coronavirus and removes the state health officer’s ability to order vaccinations in a public health emergency.
In Ohio, House Republicans last month passed a bill that would block employers, schools and colleges from requiring workers and students to get vaccinated if they object for “reasons of personal conscience.” Some Republicans in the state Senate are reticent, contending that businesses should be allowed to decide on vaccine policies for themselves.
Senate Bill 22, the Buckeye State’s law in effect since June, splintered the party, pitting lawmakers against Ohio’s GOP governor Mike DeWine. A year ago, DeWine vetoed another bill that would have limited the state’s coronavirus-fighting powers by handing lawmakers power to stop a governor’s public health order and tightly limiting the state health department’s ability to impose quarantines.
The bill contains those features and added restrictions on local health departments. In March, DeWine vetoed that bill, too, saying it “strikes at the heart of local health departments’ ability to move quickly to protect the public from the most serious emergencies Ohio could face.”
This time, the legislature overrode the governor’s veto on S.B. 22 the following day.
In Franklin County, which includes Hilliard, the local board of health dates to 1919, the time of a global flu pandemic that killed millions. In July 2020, as the coronavirus spread, the board ordered people to wear masks indoors, except at home. It lifted the rule the following May, weeks before the state law took effect and shortly after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had said people who were fully vaccinated no longer needed to wear a mask.
By late summer, cases were surging again.
“We wanted to be able to put a masking requirement in place for our jurisdictions,” said Mazzola, the Franklin County health commissioner, who works for the board.
Under the new law, only local governments can make that decision. The Franklin health district covers 14 cities, 17 townships and 10 villages. “We called on our city managers, city councils, mayors,” Mazzola said. Two of the cities, Bexley and Whitehall, reinstated mask rules. The others did not. The villages and most of the townships do not have authority to create such rules. Four townships do; they did not require masks.
“That’s really an unfortunate outcome here,” Mazzola said. “It creates mixed messaging.”
The new law also means the Franklin County health department no longer can create uniform rules for all school systems within its area.
When the school year opened, after a year of classes mostly online, 5 of the 17 districts required masks for students and teachers in every grade, according to Ayaz Hyder, a researcher in Ohio State University’s College of Public Health who has been tracking the pandemic in nearby public schools. The first weeks of the year, the districts with universal masking had on average significantly fewer cases of the coronavirus than the rest, Hyder found.
At Hale’s Ales & Kitchen, just over the Hilliard line where there is no mask requirement, patrons are asked to wear a face covering voluntarily if they haven’t been vaccinated, workers there said. Chris Hale, the owner, did not return phone calls seeking comment.
Even when Ohio’s elected municipal officials have stepped in to adopt public health strategies of their own, controversies sometimes have swirled.
In August, the village of Gambier, home to Kenyon College, approved a temporary mask requirement for public buildings, including schools, with a $25 fine for violators. The county sheriff posted on his Facebook page that he had spoken with the mayor “and informed him that deputies will not be citing anyone for violations.”
Sheriff David Shaffer’s Facebook announcement drew more than 700 replies, mirroring the fevered views that divide the nation over public health during the pandemic.
“So … you are elected to decide which law to enforce?” one woman wrote.
Many praised the sheriff. “The more you protect our God-given freedoms,” one man wrote, “the greater my respect for you. … Please continue to defy tyrants who are trying to destroy our freedom.”
Such sentiment — and the Ohio law it yielded — leave the state’s health officials feeling impotent as each pandemic wave arrives.
In September, Jack Pepper, administrator of the Athens City-County Health Department, worried as his southeastern Ohio jurisdiction, which contains both historical Ohio University and rural poverty, suffered the largest surge in coronavirus hospitalizations and deaths of the pandemic so far.
“It would have been nice,” Pepper said, if the department could have limited the number of patrons in restaurants, as it had when establishments reopened after a pandemic shutdown early on. “Those powers are all gone.”
