Hong Hate Horoscope: Week of September 13, 2021
The Lead
America needs to decide how much Covid-19 risk it will tolerate
Great from Vox. What the hell is our end goal and how are we gonna get there? My only issue is (of course) that they only interviewed epidemiologists and no other experts for this piece, but it’s generally well thought out. I’m just glad that someone is thinking about trade-offs, even if they’re hard.
The lack of a clear end goal has hindered America’s anti-pandemic efforts from the start. At first, the goal of restrictions was to “flatten the curve”: to keep the number of cases low enough that hospitals could treat those that did arise. But that consensus crumbled against the reality of the coronavirus — leaving the country with patchwork restrictions and no clear idea of what it meant to “beat” Covid-19, let alone a strategy to achieve a victory.
The vaccines were supposed to be a way out. But between breakthrough infections, the risks of long Covid, and new variants, it’s becoming clear the vaccines didn’t get rid of the need to answer the underlying question of what the Covid-19 endgame is.
And a potential solution (another thought I’m had before):
A glimpse of what this could look like in the future came from a study in Provincetown, Massachusetts. The study was at first widelyreported as evidence that the virus can still spread among the vaccinated because the outbreak happened in a highly vaccinated population, and three-fourths of those who were infected had gotten their shots.
But experts now argue for another interpretation of the study: It’s what a post-pandemic world could look like. Yes, the coronavirus still circulated among vaccinated people. But in an outbreak that eventually infected more than 1,000, only seven hospitalizations and zero deaths have been recorded. If this was 2020, given overall hospitalization and death rates, the outbreak would have likely produced around 100 hospitalizations and 10 deaths.
“We should cheer,” Amesh Adalja, senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told me. “The Provincetown outbreak, contrary to what the press reported, was evidence not of the vaccines’ failure but of their smashing success.”
And the questions we should be asking and how others are doing it.
Another consideration is whether some Covid-related precautions become permanent. Social distancing in any of its forms doesn’t seem like a candidate. But what about masking in indoor spaces? More frequent testing? Vastly improving indoor ventilation? Doing more things outdoors? Depending on whether Americans embrace these other interventions, the level of Covid-19 risk people have to tolerate may end up being lower — but what “normal” looks like would also be redefined to some degree.
Other countries are talking about these trade-offs more explicitly. Australian leaders, for example, have said that they will shift from a long-heralded “Covid zero” strategy once vaccination rates hit certain thresholds — even though this means continued cases and deaths, particularly among the unvaccinated. In the US, the end goal has never been so clear.
Experts argue that these kinds of questions need to be out in the open, so Americans and their leaders can openly discuss them and decide on a plan forward. [Vox]
Good journalism/Cool shit
So good on gentrification and housing supply. It’s anecdotal evidence, but it’s strong:
Lets identify two Census tracts, one with and without new housing construction, but both with sizable Black populations, both beside each other and compare:
Pill Hill/Koreatown in 2010 was home to 1,255 Black residents, and Hoover-Foster in 2010 was home to 2,090 Black residents. Pill Hill/Koreatown added 1,014 homes in the last 10 years, a 55% increase in housing and Hoover-Foster added just 31 or an 1.8% increase in 10 years.
So how did both Black populations end up 10 years later?
As stated earlier, there are 40 fewer Black residents in Pill Hill/Koreatown. Hoover-Foster? 512 fewer Black residents. That’s a 3.2% decline in Black residents in Pill Hill/Koreatown versus 24.5% decline in Black residents in Hoover-Foster.
That seems pretty revealing.
The white population increased marginally more in the Koreatown/Pill Hill tract than they did in Hoover-Foster. But the 1,014 units of extra housing appears to have cushioned the Black residents from the gentrification blow in Pill Hill/Koreatown, probably since the newcomers moved into the new development instead of existing housing. Hoover-Foster, with no added housing capacity, forced newcomers and incumbent residents to compete for existing housing and over 500 Black residents were displaced as a result.
\The Plan to Stop Every Respiratory Virus at Once
This is very cool and not a rehash of every dumb conversation we’ve had before (h/t Stadler).
The 19th and early 20th century saw a number of ambitious public-health efforts like this. The United States eliminated yellow fever and malaria, for example, with a combination of pesticides, wide-scale landscape management, and window screens that kept mosquitoes at bay. One by one, the diseases that people accepted as inevitable facts in life—dysentery, typhoid, typhus, to name a few more—became unacceptable in the developing world. But after all this success, after all we’ve done to prevent the spread of disease through water and insects, we seem to have overlooked something. We overlooked air.
This turned out to have devastating consequences for the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic. The original dogma, you might remember, was that the novel coronavirus spread like the flu, through droplets that quickly fell out of the air. We didn’t need ventilation or masks; we needed to wash our hands and disinfect everything we touched. But a year and half of evidence has made clear that the tiny virus-laden particles indeed linger in the air of poorly ventilated areas. It explains why outdoors is safer than in, why a single infected person can super-spread to dozens of others without directly speaking to or touching them. If we are to live with this coronavirus forever—as seems very likely—some scientists are now pushing to reimagine building ventilation and clean up indoor air. We don’t drink contaminated water. Why do we tolerate breathing contaminated air? [The Atlantic]
Sports hot takes
Would you like politics with your sports? (sorry not sorry)
Hate reading
shot:
and chaser:
me to Liz Bruenig: