Day 174…
And just like that, we are into September.
This morning looks like one of those perfect New York City days.
“Summers in Jersey, you get a string of days that are so thick and humid that you can hardly breathe. Then, out of the blue, there’s that one day that’s crystal clear, and so cool, you thank God for the day you were born.” So says the character of Frankie Valli in the musical of Jersey Boys.
Yesterday, four guys in London put on their red Sherry jackets and performed a few songs on a UK morning television show. Their posts of the morning’s event were like looking at those memory moments that Facebook dredges up from years past to remind you where you were a year ago. Or seven years ago.
Back in March, my work calendar looked pretty empty looking forward into the summer months, but it was already pretty full up starting right about now through the rest of the year.
What would have happened, before the pandemic hit, was that the summer would have ended up being fairly busy and this time would probably have been insanely busy, with an incredible amount of juggling necessary, on my part, to get through it. The calendar always had a way of expanding.
Instead, nothing much was added into the blank spaces over these last five months and rather than adding things into the next five months with my yellow plastic mechanical pencil, I am starting to erase what’s already there.
Looking at other countries around the world, it is clear that it doesn’t need to be like this. We could have avoided a lot of this.
When much of Scandinavia went into early lockdown back in the spring, Sweden did not. Sweden stayed open. Schools stayed open. Many people worked from home, but offices were open, and workers were encouraged to go to them to belie the gravity of the situation and many did.
Anders Tegnell, the state epidemiologist who came up with Sweden’s no-lockdown approach said, “In the autumn there will be a second wave” by then, “Sweden will have a high level of immunity and the number of cases will probably be quite low.”
To date the rest of Scandinavia has done fairy well. In Finland, 335 have died of the virus. 264 people have died in Norway and 624 in Denmark.
To date, by comparison, 5,800 Swedes have lost their lives to the virus.
Economically, Sweden has fared slightly better than some of its European neighbors to the south, but not any better than its Scandinavian neighbors. So, their decision to stay open had no appreciable effect on their economy but merely resulted in the needless deaths of 5,000+ of its citizens.
Here in the US, we followed neither of these paths. Instead, due to a lack of effective national leadership, what we did was a pathetically inept combination of the two. We shut down, but then reopened too soon.
If we had ALL shut down for about six weeks early on and mandated social distancing and mask-wearing, we would very likely now be in the position that many other countries are. As a country, we would very likely be in the position that New York state is currently in.
New York has now had 24 straight days of our infection rate being below 1%. One person in New York state passed away yesterday from the virus but nobody in New York City. There are 109 patients in ICU units throughout the state. These are the lowest numbers we’ve had since the beginning of the pandemic.
Mistakes were made in New York, but the numbers don’t lie. What we did here has worked. What other states did, did not.
Nationally, we breezed past the 6 million mark of cases yesterday. As of this moment, 183,649 people are reported to have lost their lives either to the virus itself or to complications that have arisen from it.
Scott Atlas is a neuroradiologist and a fellow at the Hoover Institution. The Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace is a conservative leaning public policy think tank that is located at Stanford University in California. He has become one of the President’s top medical advisors of late.
He is urging the President to follow the Swedish model and advocates the development of herd immunity to combat the virus in the United States. Atlas, who has no background in infectious diseases or epidemiology, is often in direct conflict with doctors Fauci and Birx. The President likes him because their views line up.
Estimates are that 2.3 MILLION people would likely die before any sort of herd immunity was achieved here. Far more than ten times the number of people who have already perished.
Of course, one of the ways that this kind of group immunity could be achieved would be through the development of a vaccine. Even if some of the current possibilities being worked on were approved, a vaccine would unlikely be available to the population before spring.
But there’s another problem. A CNN poll this morning reported that 40% of Americans wouldn’t take the vaccine even were it available.
There is a growing number of anti-vaxxers who simply do not trust vaccines at all. That accounts for some of this number. The rest come from people who do not seem to trust the current government to give a new vaccine the proper testing that it deserves.
They are not wrong to be wary. The US government, unfortunately, has a history of rushing vaccines into production before they are ready, with terrible results.
In 1955, the US Government, led by President Eisenhower, announced a new polio vaccine which was rushed into production.
One of the companies that produced it accidentally incorporated the live polio virus into it and 40,000 kids got polio. 10 kids died and hundreds were left paralyzed. In addition to that, 10-30% of the vaccines were contaminated with something called simian virus-40. To produce the virus, it was grown on monkey tissues and some of the monkeys they used were infected with this SV40.
In 1976, President Ford was advised that a pandemic was on its way. It was the virus that came to be known as the Swine Flu. The President was talked into making it mandatory that people get vaccinated against it. The vaccine was rushed into production and about 40 million people were administered it. The vaccine was later linked to several hundred cases of Guillian-Barre syndrome.
Rushing a COVID-19 vaccine into mass production without adequate testing is extremely likely to have similar results. Peter Marks, the Director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research vowed to resign last week if his agency approves a new vaccine without adequate testing.
While all of this is going on, the President continues to lie. About everything.
Unwanted and unasked for, he is heading to Kenosha, Wisconsin this morning. On the tarmac as he was departing, he voiced support to the armed right-wing militias that are infiltrating cities like Kensoha and fomenting violence. He has yet to mention Jabob Blake’s name, the man who lies paralyzed in a hospital bed, shot in the back by the Police in front of his three kids.
The only thing that the President is interested in is being re-elected. Almost nothing out of his mouth these days has even a glancing semblance to a fact. He seems to think that the more that he can incite violence throughout the nation, the more people will fear a Joe Biden presidency.
Again, I say, all of this violence and mayhem is happening under HIS watch. All of these virus deaths are happening under HIS watch.
We desperately need a change.
As I was writing this, the day changed. Unforcasted, the heavens opened up and it started pouring down rain.
New York City has something called Local Law 11. The law is designed to prevent pieces of the facades of old buildings from becoming loose and falling, thereby injuring people. Periodically, buildings are inspected, and reports made. Buildings then have a certain amount of time to make repairs and upgrades.
Our building is currently having work done on it - re-pointing of some brickwork and other similar projects. Scaffolding is up over the entrance and guys have been working around the building for the last few weeks.
Over the last few days, they have been drilling into the building directly outside of our apartment. The noise has been incredible. Today was meant to be the last day of that near us before they moved around to the front.
They were drilling until the rain interrupted them. As blissfully quiet as it is now, this break just means that we are likely to get more noise again tomorrow.
If all of us in the US had just been able to agree to shut everything down together when this started, and keep it shut down until the viral rate across the country dropped, we would be in such a different position now. The shutdown would now be in the past, rather than ever looming on the horizon again before us. If we had all shut down together, it wouldn’t matter as much whether or not there was a vaccine, we would now be in the positive position that many places around the world, including us here in New York City, are.
The Local Law 11 work in our building is beyond annoying, but it’s for a limited period of time. When it is done, the stone and brickwork of our building will be safe for the innocent passersby who walk underneath it every day. As annoying as it is, we can put up with the noise until it is done. We don’t actually have a choice. Better that it all be done at once than we spread it out throughout the fall.
Our country’s leadership needs to bite the bullet and make some difficult decisions. Allowing 2.3 million people to die through active inactivity is not an acceptable option. It is completely unnecessary and totally avoidable.
God only knows what nonsense and horror the President is going to unleash upon us today as he lands in Kenosha but prepare for a lot of lies and inflammatory rhetoric. These days, that’s a guarantee.
We deserve better,
Rain or no rain, I am now going to go out, duck under our scaffolding, and go for a walk. And breathe in this beautiful, slightly damp, totally unscheduled day.
💕happy september 1
I wish us all wonderful new beginnings
I can sense it in the air
despite the numbers
I’m counting my blessings
you are one