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Monday was a day full of pandemic dissonance. Tuesday will probably be too.
That same day we learned of a big leap forward for public health – Pfizer saying its Covid-19 vaccine is safe for children – we also heard of a horrific marker of death. “Despite all the scientific and medical advances of the past 103 years,” wrote CNN’s Holly Yan, this pandemic “has now killed more Americans than the influenza pandemic of 1918.”
When authorities say the United States averages about 2,000 Covid deaths per day, while the same sources say fully vaccinated Americans are well protected from serious illness, we find ourselves in a state of pandemic dissonance every day. . It’s a special kind of tension that exists when images of crowded stadiums appear in social media feeds alongside stories of overwhelmed hospitals. I see it on my thread when a breakthrough like the news from Pfizer occurs: People who have been “back to normal” for months can’t believe other people are still taking strict precautions – and vice versa.
This tension is particularly acute when we do not have the appropriate context or data to assess the circumstances in which we find ourselves. Try this: Find your own community’s Covid data dashboard. Try to determine the number of recent hospitalizations and deaths among vaccinated versus unvaccinated adults. I tried this for my neighborhood and failed.
Every now and then, federal and state officials provide snapshots that show that the vast majority of suffering and death occurs among the non-vaxxed – that is, adults who have chosen not to protect themselves. But the data is not available in a consistent and searchable manner. It is at best piecemeal. So it remains for us to assume, guess, do risk assessments without reliable data, and this leads to even more pandemic dissonance …
Follow the rules or change the rules
I understand the whole context of these scenes, but the photos always make me disgusted. It shouldn’t be just a “right-wing media” problem. It’s a question of “everyone with common sense”. CNN’s Brianna Keilar, to her credit, cited an example of hypocrisy on Monday’s “New Day.” She showed the video of the SF London Breed mayor partying, without a mask, with a crowd fully vaccinated. “The mayor of a major American city is not following the sanitary guidelines of his own health department,” Keilar said.
Breed, defending, told reporters “we don’t need the funny police” to “micromanage” mask wearing as long as the population is vaccinated. I agree – but that’s not the city’s position or the CDC’s position. These politicians should follow the rules or change the rules. If they don’t have authority, they should put pressure on those who have it. If it’s too complicated, they should push to make it simpler. The restrictions, rules and recommendations in this phase of the pandemic should not be uniform. They should be customized based on specific locale, positivity rate, and tolerance levels. But they are not. As the “rules” have less and less meaning, and they are not applied equally or not at all, they will be followed less and less, if at all …
LA County Says Emmys Did Not Violate Mask Mandate
The stories of the right
Notes and quotes on the vaccine war
6 rules …
CNN RTO Update
Oliver Darcy writes: “No surprise here. CNN on Monday became the latest company to postpone its return to office date to 2022. Network boss Jeff Zucker broke the news to employees in a memo, saying executives were “came to the conclusion that a full return to the office in October does not look good to me. Zucker, who mentioned the rise of the Delta variant in Atlanta, where CNN’s headquarters are located, said the new target date was January 10. But he encouraged employees to start coming to the office now, which many staff have already done. I’ll find… it’s actually pretty awesome, ”Zucker said, adding,“ The transition doesn’t start in January. She’s starting now… “”
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