Category: pandemic

Are people becoming more talkative during the pandemic?

July 28, 2020 • 8:15 am

I’ve noticed in the last couple of months that people I talk to, either over the phone or in person, seem to have become much more loquacious, to the point where  it seems that 90% or more of the conversational airtime is taken up by one person’s words. (To be sure, I’m often laconic.) Now I haven’t quantified this, though I could do so, at least over the phone with a stopwatch. But subjectively, it seems to me a real temporal change.

The first thing to determine is whether the subjective change is an objective change. To determine that, I would have to have timed participation in conversations over the last year or so, and compared the conversational “pie” before and after lockdown. And I don’t have that data. 

In the absence of hard data, it’s possible that I’ve simply become more peevish and impatient, so that it only seems that people are monopolizing conversations more. And indeed, I think I have become more peevish, though I think many people have changed in this way as well.

But let’s assume it’s real: that the proportion of conversational time in a two-person chat has become more unequal since March.  If that’s the case, why?

The only explanation I can imagine is that people who are more socially isolated have become more eager to talk, and that’s manifested in a higher degree of conversational dominance. Of course if two such chatty people meet, it could be a festival of interruptions and “talking over,” but I tend to become monosyllabic, and this is exacerbated when I am peevish.  My philosophy has always been that in a conversation, you learn nothing by talking but only by listening.

At any rate, am I imagining this or have others noticed it?

Andrew Sullivan back at the Weekly Dish, and a disquisition on the J. K. Rowling kerfuffle

July 26, 2020 • 11:00 am

Andrew Sullivan has left the room, meaning New York Magazine (NYM), and good for him—and woe to them.  He’s back at the Weekly Dish, a reincarnation of his previous website, complete with his trademarked beagle. You can subscribe for for only $50 a year (here), though for a limited time the content is free (click on screenshot below). After looking at his first “issue,” I think I’ll probably subscribe. It’s the same price as the New York Times (if you threaten to unsubscribe and then take their counteroffer), but a lot more fun—and unpredictable. It also includes the famous “view from my window” feature, in which you have to guess where a locale is that was photographed by a reader from their window.

As with his NYM columns, this week’s offering is tripartite: a mini-essay on the connection between the pandemic and the demonstrators, a defense of J. K. Rowling, and a nostalgic look back at a past that had dial telephones and open restaurants. There’s also a postscript in which Sullivan recounts some pushback he’s gotten from readers, to which he responds. I like that feature, and may do something like it here, though I don’t want to ape my betters.

The pandemic/demonstration connection may be a variant of the essay that NYM refused to publish, which likely prompted Sullivan to leave the magazine. It’s not that incendiary, though it does blame the pandemic for some of the political unrest pervading the country. That said, Sullivan still pins most of the blame on Trump, though he worries that the violent nature of some of the demonstrations may better Trump’s chances in the fall. Two short extracts:

We are, mercifully, in a much better place [than in 1918]. But it strikes me that this medical achievement doesn’t resolve the psychological trauma, the suspension of normality, the anxiety of an invisible enemy. It merely diverts it away from the illness itself toward broader social and political grievances. I don’t think you can fully explain the sudden increase in intensity of the social justice cult, for example, and its explosion in our streets and in our media in the last couple of months, without taking account of this. I don’t just mean the pent-up plague-driven frustration of young people, who, often forced to live at home with their parents, took the opportunity to finally get out, get together and do something, after the horrifying murder of George Floyd. I mean the more general frustration and despair of a generation with a gloomy and unknowable economic future—suddenly finding shape and voice in a simple, clarion call to reshape all of society.

I suspect that if this was part of Sullivan’s “canceled” essay, the mere suggestion that people made restive by the pandemic could throw their boredom into demonstrations would be likely deemed unpublishable by a woke rag like NYM, even if it be true. After all, it’s not only demonstrations that were probably invigorated by the pandemic: there’s also an epidemic of civilian shootings, especially in Chicago. This goes beyond our normal summer violence, and I think a good hypothesis is inactivity, pent-up emotions, and the absence of regular outlets for activity.

Sullivan on Trump:

All of which is a highly combustible situation, bristling with menace. What Trump has been doing since the Mount Rushmore speech—stupidly dismissed by woke media—is to try and cast this election as a battle between anarchy and the forces of law and order, between a radical dystopia laced with violence and the America we know. He’s trying to jujitsu the plague-fueled revolt into a winning campaign issue. He can’t exactly run on his record of double digit unemployment and an epidemic raging out of control. So this is his instinct. And politically, it’s not a bad one. In an environment where people are afraid and uncertain, authoritarianism has an edge. The more some cities descend into lawlessness and violence this summer, the edgier, and more popular, that performative authoritarianism could get.

. . . I may be worrying too much about the effect of this on the election, as Trump’s abject failure to control the virus remains front and center. He’s still likely to lose, absent a major surprise. But plagues are highly divisive and highly unpredictable.

But I want to talk a bit more about Sullivan’s defense of J. K. Rowling, who has been demonized and called a “transphobe” for issuing these tweets:

Indeed, while I agree that gender is a “social construct” (though I’d prefer a better word), biological sex is real and almost completely bimodal.  If there are transsexual people, then, are they simply moving from one gender role to another, or are they moving beyond their biological sex, which is what “transsexual” literally means. And how can you move beyond your sex if sex isn’t something that’s real?

While the first tweet above was perhaps unwise (I wouldn’t have said it, though I think the use of these euphemisms for “women” is ludicrous), the second tweet is pretty much accurate. But of course it is hateful to speak some truths these days, and that’s what angers Sullivan.  People like him, me, and Rowling all agree that we will accept whatever gender role people adopt; we insist on their equality in law and morality (with a few small exceptions, see below); and we’re glad to use whatever pronouns people choose. We abhor and excoriate those who demonize transsexuals, and insist that their identities be treated with respect. The rest is commentary, but what commentary! It’s led to many outlets insisting that Rowling is transphobic (she isn’t), and that her books are now verboten.

If you read her open letter about her views, it’s hard to construe her as a transphobe; but read it for yourself. She’s concerned with the distinction between biological women and trans women, and that is a matter worth discussing on some fronts, like sports, rape counseling, who goes to prison, and so on. But she also issued the tweet below, explaining it in her open letter;

For people who don’t know: last December I tweeted my support for Maya Forstater, a tax specialist who’d lost her job for what were deemed ‘transphobic’ tweets. She took her case to an employment tribunal, asking the judge to rule on whether a philosophical belief that sex is determined by biology is protected in law. Judge Tayler ruled that it wasn’t. Ergo this:

And yes, biological sex is real. And no, transwomen aren’t biological women, but they assume that gender role; and it would be wrong to denigrate them or deny them rights for doing so.

At any rate, Sullivan, who is of course gay, has an eloquent defense of Rowling, and here’s some of it:

[Rowling] became interested in the question after a consultant, Maya Forsteter, lost a contract in the UK for believing and saying that sex is a biological reality. When Forsteter took her case to an employment tribunal, the judge ruled against her, arguing that such a view was a form of bigotry, in so far as it seemed to deny the gender of trans people (which, of course, it doesn’t). Rowling was perturbed by this. And I can see why: in order either to defend or oppose transgender rights, you need to be able to discuss what being transgender means. That will necessarily require an understanding of the human mind and body, the architectonic role of biology in the creation of two sexes, and the nature of the small minority whose genital and biological sex differs from the sex of their brain.

This is not an easy question. It requires some thinking through. And in a liberal democracy, we should be able to debate the subject freely and openly. I’ve done my best to do that in this column, and have come to many of the conclusions Rowling has. She does not question the existence of trans people, or the imperative to respect their dignity and equality as fully-formed human beings. She believes they should be protected from discrimination in every field, and given the same opportunities as anyone else. She would address any trans person as the gender they present, as would I. Of course. That those of us who hold these views are now deemed bigots is, quite simply, preposterous.

Where Rowling and I draw the line is saying that a trans woman is in every single respect indistinguishable from a natal woman. We believe that a natal man who is a transwoman, for example, cannot have a vagina exactly as a natal woman does. That’s all. And that is objectively true. Note also that this has no impact whatever on how someone should be treated by society or under the law. A transwoman can and should be treated exactly as a woman, even if she isn’t in every single respect a woman.

There are a few areas where this becomes a problem for some: a) restrooms, b) sports, and c) shelters for abused women. On a), I have zero issues with trans women with penises using the women’s room. I know some worry that creeps simply posing as transwomen could exploit this in order to gain access to children. But I have yet to see such a case in reality. It should be simple: just use a stall and mind your own business. On b), sports is different, because the physiology of male and female bodies is, by virtue of our species’ reproductive strategy, bimodal, and in sports reliant on strength and size and speed, no co-ed contest can be fair. And the last issue c) is about whether women who are in shelters for those who have been abused by men should be allowed spaces where no actual penises, even if attached to women, are around. On this difficult third area, I defer to abused women on the question of shelters. And here’s the thing: Rowling is one such woman. She told her own story of marital abuse in her letter, with a disarming honesty that surely should evoke engagement, rather than vilification.

JAC: I agree with the Sullivan’s take on the three “exceptions” above.  He ends with some common sense: demonization is not a response to an argument, it is avoidance of an argument. Sullivan:

It pains me to see where this debate has gone. There’s so much common ground. And I do not doubt that taking into account the lived experiences of trans people is important. But if we cannot state an objective fact without being deemed a bigot, and if we cannot debate a subject because debating itself is a form of hate, we have all but abandoned any pretense of liberal democracy. And if a woman as sophisticated and eloquent and humane as J K Rowling is now deemed a foul bigot for having a different opinion, then the word bigotry has ceased to have any meaning at all.

I’ve quoted more extensively than I wanted, for Sullivan’s website will become a subscription-only site, soon, and my quotes after that will fall within “fair usage.” But I urge you to subscribe, as it looks like a good place to visit.

AP/NORC poll: Most religious Americans see a message from God in the coronavirus pandemic

July 26, 2020 • 9:00 am

In one way things haven’t changed since the Middle Ages: the onset of a pandemic leads people to search for a greater meaning, usually involving the wrath of a god. So, for instance, the Black Death was blamed on a lack of piety (penitentes arose), the perfidy of the Jews, and so on.

Now, in America, many of us are still seeing God’s will in what’s happening. A poll by the Associated Press and the respected polling operation NORC, along with the University of Chicago Divinity School (!), shows that roughly two-thirds of Americans who believe in God think that the deity is sending us a message through the pandemic.

Click on the screenshot to read the report:

An excerpt:

The poll found that 31% of Americans who believe in God feel strongly that the virus is a sign of God telling humanity to change, with the same number feeling that somewhat. Evangelical Protestants are more likely than others to believe that strongly, at 43%, compared with 28% of Catholics and mainline Protestants.

The sad tale is told in the first graph below. Note that this is not a cross section of Americans, but of believers. Yet even 42% of the “unaffiliated” (i.e., the “nones”) think that the pandemic somehow conveys a message from God. Of course born-again Protestants think that in  spades (70% of them), but even 65% of Catholics adhere to that delusion.

Note too that the message is “humanity needs to change how we are living.”  It’s not clear exactly what we’re doing wrong this time, or what we were doing wrong in 1918, but surely this is a nasty God. After all, did he have to kill 644,000 people (today’s total death toll worldwide) to convey that message? Why did he kill the children, too? And are the U.S. and Brazil particularly in need of that message? And why, in the fourteenth century, did God kill off 60% of all Europeans? After all, they were far more pious than Americans today, but yet they got an even sterner message.

The second row in the figure below shows that 73% of born-agains, compared with 52% of Catholics and only 32% of nones, think that God will protect them from being infected.

All this testifies to the power of delusion, since there’s not an iota of evidence that God engineered this pandemic. Those who assert such a thing must answer these questions: How do you know this? What are we doing wrong to anger God? And do the national disparities in death tolls comport with the message that God’s supposed to be sending?

 

There’s a racial breakdown too, though it’s not graphed:

The question was asked of all Americans who said they believe in God, without specifying a specific faith. The survey did not have a sample size large enough to report on the opinions of religious faiths with smaller numbers of U.S. adherents, including Muslims and Jews.

In addition, black Americans were more likely than those of other racial backgrounds to say they feel the virus is a sign God wants humanity to change, regardless of education, income or gender. Forty-seven percent say they feel that strongly, compared with 37% of Latino and 27% of white Americans.

An explanation from the Sophisticated Theologians®:

David Emmanuel Goatley, a professor at Duke University’s divinity school who was not involved with the survey, said religious black Americans’ view of godly protection could convey “confidence or hope that God is able to provide — that does not relinquish personal responsibility, but it says God is able.”

Goatley, who directs the school’s Office of Black Church Studies, noted a potential distinction between how religious black Americans and religious white Americans might see their protective relationship with God.

Within black Christian theology is a sense of connection to the divine in which “God is personally engaged and God is present,” he said. That belief, he added, is “different from a number of white Christians, evangelical and not, who would have a theology that’s more a private relationship with God.”

Now talk about a real delusion, have a look at the figure below. (This appears to be a sample of all Americans, not just those who believe in God, though it’s not clear.)

As the report notes, “Overall, 82% of Americans say they believe in God, and 26% of Americans say their sense of faith or spirituality has grown stronger as a result of the outbreak. Just 1% say it has weakened.”

Think about that: a naturalistic pandemic that kills people willy-nilly, still increases people’s faith in God!

What, pray tell, would decrease their faith in God? When there’s no pandemic faith remains steady, when there is a pandemic faith grows stronger, so should we expect that when the pandemic wanes, or we get a vaccine, faith in God will decrease? No, of course not: believers will just say that God is satisfied that people will change their lives. Still, it’s up to believers who think God’s sending a message to be explicit about what that message is. After all, if you know God is sending us a message, you must also know its content.

Andrew Sullivan’s last piece for NY Magazine

July 21, 2020 • 2:00 pm

Andrew Sullivan is moving to a new site, his own Daily Dish revived as the Weekly Dish. But his farewell piece in New York Magazine is not last week’s column, but today’s long article—about plagues. Well researched and engagingly written, it’s a change from Sullivan’s usual discussions of politics and sociology. It’s long (7 pages printed out in 9-point type), but well worth reading. Click on the screenshot to do so:

If you haven’t read one of the many good books on plagues and epidemics, this is a worthy substitute. Sullivan’s aim is not only to describe the many plagues that afflicted our species over recorded history, but also to explain why they happened as well as the sequelae, both good and bad. Going from smallpox in the Roman era through bubonic plague in medieval Europe and the big effect of smallpox on the American Continental Army to the “Spanish influenza” and then the viruses of today, the article is a pretty horrifying chronicle. Sullivan describes his own experiences during the AIDS epidemic (which, he argues, helped speed the acceptance of gay rights), and winds up musing about how Covid-19 might lead to a reinvention of society in ways both good and bad. The worst “bad” is the globalization and disruption of the environment that may release more plagues to come: Sullivan is pretty sure we’ll be ravaged now and again for the forseeable future. All in all, it’s not a happy piece.

A few excerpts:

Paradoxically, the Black Death also reshaped and rebuilt the rural economy to benefit the poor. With half the population suddenly wiped out by bubonic plague, food became plentiful and cheap as soon as the harvests returned, because there were so many fewer mouths to feed, and the price of labor soared because so many workers had perished. Day laborers suddenly had some leverage over the owners of land and exploited it. A manpower shortage also led to innovations. With fewer people on higher wages, for example, the cost of making a book became prohibitive — because it required plenty of scribes and copiers. And so the incentive to invent the printing press was created. Industries like fishing (new methods of curing), shipping (new kinds of ships both bigger and requiring less manpower), and mining (new water pumps) innovated to do more with fewer people. The historian David Herlihy puts it this way: “Plague … broke the Malthusian deadlock … which threatened to hold Europe in its traditional ways for the indefinite future.”

In these two bookends of European plague, in the sixth and then the 14th century, you see two ways in which epidemic disease changed society and culture. In one, the disruption and dislocation of mass disease sent the world into a long de-civilizing process; Roman society was gutted and its empire dissolved into various fiefdoms. In the other, a mass-death event triggered a revival, economic and spiritual, in a kind of cleansing process that restarted European society. They were caused by the same disease. In one case, it brought collapse; in the other, rebirth.

And:

If the 1918 flu pandemic were to occur today, one 2013 study found, it would kill between 188,000 and 337,000 Americans. The reason the death toll would be so much lower than the 675,000 Americans who actually died is that medicine has improved. Many of those who died endured bacterial co-infections, which are now far more treatable with antibiotics. Globally, somewhere around 100 million human beings perished.

The flu’s symptoms were horrifying. In her book Pandemic 1918, Catharine Arnold notes that “victims collapsed in the streets, hemorrhaging from lungs and nose. Their skin turned dark blue with the characteristic ‘heliotrope cyanosis’ caused by oxygen failure as the lungs filled with pus, and they gasped for breath from ‘air-hunger’ like landed fish.” The nosebleeds were projectile, covering the surroundings with blood. “When their lungs collapsed,” one witness recounted, “air was trapped beneath their skin. As we rolled the dead in winding sheets, their bodies crackled — an awful crackling noise which sounded like Rice Crispies [sic] when you pour milk over them.”

And:

Do we go back to where we were, or do we somehow reinvent ourselves for a new future?

You can see the potential contours of a similar response today. This plague makes a strong argument for a more aggressive approach to public health, which would mean, at a minimum, extending health insurance to everyone in the country, as well as reform and renewal for the disgraced CDC and WHO. It could unleash a new wave of infrastructure spending to repair the immense damage to the economy. It could, and absolutely should, end the argument over preventing climate change — because it is so deeply connected to new viral outbreaks, as shifts to hotter weather portend a highly dangerous upheaval in the animal and microbial worlds. And while I worry that this plague could well usher in a new era in which traditional liberalism gives way to a freshly invigorated collective leftism, particularly around identity politics, it could also deeply wound the appeal of the populist right in America, which, once in government, failed the core test of preventing an open-ended, lengthy period of infection, sickness, and death.

Some existing trends might also intensify. It’s hard to see how a policy of mass immigration or free trade will survive public scrutiny for long in a world where viruses cross borders with such surpassing ease. The U.S.-China relationship, already tense, could deteriorate still further. Living online, with all the isolation and depression and extremism that can generate, is now an even stronger and widespread norm, as we avoid physical interaction even more than we did previously. Same with working from home: The atomization of our culture, the already increasing levels of depression, loneliness, and antisocial behavior could deepen further. The collapse of small retail has been accelerated, and the power of the giant tech companies is ever greater. And the epidemic has not assuaged the yawning gap between rich and poor. While COVID relief has made a real, temporary impact, the stark social and economic inequality in the country looms as large as ever. Rates of suicide, drug abuse, and overdosing could climb even higher.

Finally:

And we are not in control. If you are still complacent that human science and technology have removed the potential for the mass extinction of humans, you should wake up. We have lucked out so far. COVID-19 is extremely transmissible but not that fatal to most people, all things considered. But even those countries that are success stories didn’t see it coming in the first place and have experienced resilient breakouts. We still have no vaccine — it may be a year or more before we get one, and we do not know how effective it will be. Imagine the next pandemic pathogen as something as devastating as Ebola and as contagious as the flu. We are as defenseless as we have ever been. This relatively mild virus shut the entire world down for a couple of months. What happens when a much worse one shuts it down for longer?

Knowledge of a brutal new virus does not prevent its spread. Only a much more profound reorientation of humankind will lower the odds: moving out of cities, curtailing global travel, ending carbon energy, mask wearing in public as a permanent feature of our lives. We either do this to lower the odds of mass death or let nature do what it does — eventually so winnowing the human stock that we are no longer a threat to the planet we live on.

That’s the sobering long view. It is hard to look at the history of plagues without reflecting on the fact that civilizations created them and that our shift from our hunter-gatherer origins into a world of globally connected city-dwelling masses has always had a time bomb attached to it. It has already gone off a few times in the past few thousand years, and we have somehow rebounded, but not without long periods, as in post-Roman Europe, of civilizational collapse. But our civilization is far bigger than Rome’s ever was: truly global and, in many ways, too big to fail. And the time bomb is still there — and its future impact could be far greater than in the past. In the strange silence of this plague, if you listen hard, you can still hear it ticking.

Let nobody say that Andrew Sullivan is an optimist.

And I need a drink.

h/t: cesar

Why is there a culture war about masks?

July 21, 2020 • 8:30 am

You are certainly aware that, at least in America, there’s a culture war between those who favor and promote the wearing of face masks during the pandemic, and those who resist them and, indeed, refuse to wear them. The Internet is full of videos of people going into stores like Wal-Mart and refusing to wear masks—even pulling guns when asked to do so—and there are also photos of demonstrations in which the yahoos flout their resistance to masks. Here are several examples. What’s more American than pulling a gun while defending your right to make others sick?

Even at Botany Pond, where there are University rules mandating the wearing of masks in that “social space”, people get testy when I ask them to put on a mask when I’m near them. Often people are polite and comply, but almost as often they get snarky or pissy or just laugh at me. One guy said “I’m wearing a mask” while pulling the mask down below his nose.

At least the campus cops will respond if there’s a group of people not social distancing and not wearing masks, though they don’t seem eager to enforce the rules. (I find that odd given that the University wants to desperately avoid getting coronavirus on campus.)

Here’s a particularly snarky way to comply with mask mandates while making you susceptible to infection:

People at a “Save America Rally” in Baton Rouge on the 4th of July across the street from the Governor’s Mansion where about 200 gathered. The 4th of July rally was organized by Jeff Crouer, Mimi Owens and Woody Jenkins, chairman of the executive committee for the Republican Party in East Baton Rouge Parish. Source.

 

Source

The anti-mask demonstrations often appear with American flags and signs, like the one just above, that forcing people to wear masks is tyranny—an abridgment of “freedom.”  This of course is ridiculous. Yes, you have the “right” to get sick if you want, but you don’t have the right to make others sick, which is the outcome of people like these getting infected. You have no more right to abjure masks in the name of freedom than Typhoid Mary did to avoid being locked up so she wouldn’t endanger others.

But this all puzzles me, and I can think of only two reasons why Americans would object so strenuously to wearing masks. The reasons are interconnected.

It’s a culture war between conservatives, who don’t like government interfering in their lives, and liberals, who have a greater concern for society. After all, it’s mostly Republicans, and Republican governors, who resist mask mandates, despite the demonstrated efficacy of masks in slowing viral transmission.

Alternatively, people might distrust the scientific evidence that masks slow viral transmission by stopping or slowing the expulsion of respiratory droplets. This is connected with the political divide above, as Republicans are more likely to deny evolution, the efficacy of vaccines, and in general are less likely to trust “elitist” scientists.  There are plenty of data on that; here’s some from a 2019 Pew Poll:

So yes, I do get where the opposition is coming from, but it seems deeply irrational for both Republicans and Democrats. People don’t want to get sick, do they? Presumably if you asked an anti-masker if Typhoid Mary should have been left free to ply her trade as a cook, or whether a kid infected with chicken pox should be allowed to go to school, they’d say “No.” Yet they demand the “right” to get infected and spread the virus to others, though they never mention the latter bit. And yes, some demand the “right” to have their kids unvaccinated, which can also spread infectious disease.

Maybe I’m missing something, but when it comes to public health, it seems profoundly democratic and yes, patriotic, to try to protect your fellow citizens.  I never would have predicted mask wars when the pandemic began, but they’re on in full force, egged on by Trump, who generally refuses to wear masks or even to say that states should mandate them, much less issue a federal mandate.

Don’t open the schools and universities, at least “live”

July 15, 2020 • 11:45 am

When the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) weighed in a while ago saying that it was essential to reopen the nation’s schools, that was before the big resurgence of the pandemic in many states. Many colleges and universities have already decided to reopen as well, though with restrictions (Harvard, for example, will have online classes, and 40% of the student body on campus each semester, while the University of Chicago will re-open with a mixture of live and “remote” classes).

Things have changed. The pandemic seems out of control in most places, and I can’t imagine a school reopening safely—not with proper masking, social distancing and the absence of groups and isolated dining. Colleges and universities are even worse, with students coming to campus from all over the U.S. and the world. How can you prevent an outbreak in such a situation? Even if children get sick less severely than adults, or not at all, many teenagers can be taken very sick, and infected children can transmit the virus to adults.

Even the AAP has walked back its statement, as ArsTechnica reports:

The American Academy of Pediatrics has clarified its stance on school reopening amid the COVID-19 pandemic after the Trump administration repeatedly used the academy’s previous statement to pressure school systems to resume in-person learning in the fall.

The AAP, in a joint statement with three large education organizations, emphasized that school reopening should be driven by science and safety—“not politics.” It also directly responded to President Trump’s threat of withholding funding from schools that did not reopen, calling the move a “misguided approach.”

The point was echoed Monday by Michael Ryan, an infectious disease expert with the World Health Organization, who implored countries not to let school reopening become “yet another political football.”

“The best and safest way to reopen schools is in the context of low community transmission that has been effectively suppressed by a broad-based comprehensive strategy,” Ryan, executive director of WHO’s health emergencies program, said in a press briefing.

Now there may be some schools, somewhere, in low-density areas with low infection rates, that could be opened safely. That’s above my pay grade. But I doubt those schools are numerous.

And yes, I’m aware that we’re trading off safety against our children’s education. My view is that the former must take precedence until the virus is under control in the U.S. And that’s not now.

Paul Krugman put it starkly in his new NYT piece:

A quote from Krugman:

So we’re now facing a terrible, unnecessary dilemma. If we reopen in-person education, we risk feeding an out-of-control pandemic. If we don’t, we impair the development of millions of American students, inflicting long-term damage on their lives and careers.

And the reason we’re in this position is that states, cheered on by the Trump administration, rushed to allow large parties and reopen bars. In a real sense America drank away its children’s future.

Now what? At this point there are probably as many infected Americans as there were in March. So what we should be doing is admitting that we blew it, and doing a severe lockdown all over again — and this time listening to the experts before reopening. Unfortunately, it’s now too late to avoid disrupting education, but the sooner we deal with this the sooner we can get our society back on track.

But we don’t have the kind of leaders we need. Instead, we have the likes of Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis, Florida’s governor, politicians who refuse to listen to experts and never admit having been wrong.

So while there have been a few grudging policy adjustments, the main response we’re seeing to colossal policy failure is a hysterical attempt to shift the blame. Some officials are trying to besmirch Dr. Fauci’s reputation; others are diving into unhinged conspiracy theories.

As a result, the outlook is grim. This pandemic is going to get worse before it gets better, and the nation will suffer permanent damage.

I’m not in charge of these decisions, thank goodness. All I know is that when the students swarm back to campus this fall, I’ll be masked and keeping my distance from them. We’re screwed, and it’s very sad.

Who will be Biden’s VP choice?

July 12, 2020 • 11:30 am

Traditionally the Vice-Presidential candidate is named in July or August, and that time is upon us. We know that Pence will be Trump’s VP candidate, and I hope both go down in flames. But who will be Biden’s?

Joe has said he’ll name a woman as the candidate, and many Dems are also plumping for a woman of color. My only hope is that the person is good, especially because, in view of Biden’s age, she may well be the first woman President.  I have no preference, nor any dog in this fight, but I hope Uncle Joe chooses well.

In his column in this week’s New York Magazine, in which he takes on the usual three topics, Andrew Sullivan muses on the candidate, guessing that she won’t be a “progressive” who could be attacked by Trump and the GOP for being too woke.

Click on the screenshot below to read (the three topics are Trump’s defeat by the coronavirus, which, says Sullivan, will cause him to lose the election in November unless Biden screws up; the Roberts court and which decisions Sullivan approves of (the religious ones!); and the rebuilding of Notre Dame in Paris in the original style (thank god!). The stuff about the VP is folded into the first section, the rest of which you can read for yourself (click on the screenshot):

Sullivan:

Another reason Biden might avoid a culture-war election is that every issue has now been subsumed into or dwarfed by the pandemic and unemployment crisis and a fight over trans rights, say, seems peripheral in contrast. And then there’s simply Joe Biden’s affect, record, and faith. It’s hard to see this lifelong Catholic really conniving with neo-Marxist atheists pledging to “dismantle whiteness.” He’s clearly not in favor of allowing crime to run rampant in the streets. He has made a critical distinction between Confederate statues and those of the Founders, and he has insisted that any removal of monuments be done peacefully and democratically. It’s just hard to paint him as a stalking horse for Ilhan Omar, as some on the right hope to. It doesn’t work.

Because of this, I suspect, the veep choice will be more important than usual. No men need apply, Biden has told us. No white women either, perhaps, if Amy Klobuchar’s withdrawal from consideration turns out to be dispositive. And the nonwhite woman who will therefore be nominated will have yet another burden: Because of Biden’s advanced age, and the likelihood of his serving only one term, she will be deemed the future leader-in-waiting. The GOP media-industrial-complex will define her pretty quickly as the person who is really in charge and try to run against her, rather than against Biden. I hope Biden is figuring out how to counter this obvious strategy and doesn’t walk into a trap. Kamala Harris? Susan Rice? To be honest, I don’t know. But if the Trump narrative is that Biden’s surface centrism disguises a resurgent far left, and that he’ll be a puppet of the woke, the veep choice may matter more than it otherwise might.

Were I to guess, I’d guess Kamala Harris, a reliable centrist who is also a person of color, with a Jamaican father and a (late) Tamil mother. Her stands are on the liberal side, she’s experienced, and she’s popular. But, you know, what do I know? I’m a biologist, not a pundit. Put your guesses below.

I’ll add a quote about the pandemic, since that’s the real topic of Sullivan’s piece:

But the virus will be the real swing voter in this election. The sheer scale of the health crisis, and its current trajectory, obviously sweeps every other issue before it, as it should. It sure hasn’t ended the culture war, which at the elite level is arguably more intense than ever, but it is in the driving seat of the economy, and that is almost always dispositive. If we enter November closing in on 200,000 deaths, with the toll rising, and in a virally caused economic slump, I just can’t see how any incumbent can get elected, and I’m usually pretty good at seeing the worst.

The only way Trump can win is to ignore the pandemic or lie about it. He is trying both right now, and neither tactic is working. And as it becomes clearer and clearer that the U.S. is now a disgraced and humiliated outlier in the developed world in its tackling of the virus, Trump’s ultimate responsibility for this dismal response and thereby our struggling economy will be harder and harder to deny. We may even be approaching the moment when the cult finally cracks. Which suggests to me a Biden and Democratic landslide is no longer out of the question.

The world is laughing at us, when they are not crying at what we have become. And if that isn’t the Trumpiest reason to vote against Trump, I don’t know what could be.

These three paragraphs, and especially the last two sentences, are eloquent—journalism at its best.