Hello,
A brief announcement before I get to this week’s newsletter: Looking ahead I’ve decided to wind things down here, and so expect the final issue of The CovOdyssey to land in your inbox July 10th. I may send out supplementals after that date if there are major new developments, but I started this newsletter as a kind of meditation in an emergency, and the emergency phase of this pandemic is, at least in the U.S., well and truly coming to an end.
Here’s the thing, though. Our precarious world isn’t going to settle down when the pandemic passes. My whole research agenda since 2015 has been premised on this idea, that a central problem of the 21st century is the increasingly elaborate work people have to do to keep things as they are currently arranged from falling apart. I wrote about this a bit in the issue about the stuck boat — that the signature of our time is the struggle to head off a stream of complex, novel crises set off by the technological innovations we’ve deployed to solve simpler, more familiar problems.
So I’m developing a new newsletter project that will talk about that, to launch sometime probably in late 2021. I’m calling it Memories of the Future, and you can be the first to get your email on the list here.
There’s an astounding figure reported out of King County, Washington this month. Between April and May of this year the county reported 15,397 positive Covid tests, and 14,895 of those infections — 97 percent — were in people who had not been fully vaccinated against the virus. Across the state of Washington for those two months the share is the same: 98 percent of all the 63,751 reported Covid cases were in the unvaccinated.
Dr. Umair Shah, the state’s health secretary, told The Seattle Times: “We’re getting to the point where it’s a tale of two societies. … It’s throughout the country that you’re seeing this split. You have one society that is protected fully and is starting to go about its business … and another that is still at high risk of transmission and infection.”
The risk to unvaccinated people is rising, particularly with the spread of the Delta variant, which drove a more-than-doubling of the pandemic death toll in India within the first two months of its emergence there. That variant is now already the dominant strain in the U.K., fueling a resurgence in cases that may threaten the country’s reopening plans, even though more than 55 percent of the population are already fully vaccinated.
The major source of concern with Delta is that it is estimated to be more than twice as contagious as the original SARS-CoV-2 virus identified in late 2019 in Wuhan. That’s especially alarming because vaccination isn’t evenly distributed geographically or socially. On the most local level, vaccination status tends to cluster in social networks, either because of shared choice or because of structural issues around access or both. So for example registered Republicans are the single group most likely to decline vaccination by choice, and because of partisan sorting they are likely to be interacting most often with like-minded vaccine refusers. This shows up at the state level — there’s a tight negative correlation between 2020 vote share for Donald Trump in a given state and its vaccination rate. At the same time, vaccination is lagging among Black and Hispanic people, more often because of issues of access than because of intention.
And, of course, there are large segments of the population who can’t yet get vaccinated either because they’re too young or because they have health conditions (allergies, weakened immune systems etc) that prevent them from receiving a shot. Children represent a particularly risky segment, because while most children don’t develop severe infections, we don’t know enough about the virus yet to be able to predict which kids are most at risk of developing debilitating long-Covid.
Vaccination is also unevenly distributed globally, though the Biden administration has pledged to donate 500 million vaccine doses, joining the rest of the G7 nations in a pool of 1 billion doses pledged to developing countries. But these donations won’t be enough, and won’t come quickly enough, to stop the spread of the Delta variant or quash the pandemic any time soon. So when Delta does inevitably arrive in the U.S., it will find large pockets of unvaccinated people to spread within and between, a population that could be large enough to drive a small resurgence of cases, hospitalizations, and deaths.
But to return to Dr. Shah’s point from above, this isn’t really a tale of two societies — it’s a tale of a patchwork society divided by access to healthcare and vaccination, by past experiences of suffering from the virus, and by cultural or ideological antagonisms that produce different ways of understanding and remembering the pandemic.
So there’s a great reunion under way across much of the country, though not everyone wants to re-enter society, some people never really left, and some people are going to continue suffering from Covid long after mainstream society moves on.
More than five million people in the U.S. are estimated to have lost someone to Covid, including 43,000 children who lost a parent, Liz Szabo writes for Kaiser Health News. These losses are disproportionately concentrated in communities of color, a disparity that holds across all age groups, including children. Out of the 33 million Americans who tested positive , as many as 8 to 10 percent of them might be suffering lingering Covid symptoms. And it’s also true that the pandemic continues to burn around the world — already in 2021 there have been more deaths from Covid-19 than in all of 2020. As Jim Downs writes in this searing account of the post-Civil War smallpox epidemic that smoldered in Black communities until the virus was eradicated in the U.S. in 1952, neglect from those in power often condemns marginalized people to suffering from disease outbreaks long after the story of the outbreak is declared over.
In large part because of the political polarization around the pandemic, there isn’t a national consensus around what we’ve just been through, or how to mourn. Even within families that suffered deaths from the virus, misinformation and distrust can get in the way of the grieving process. It produces a phenomenon termed “disenfranchised loss,” according to this excellent piece from public broadcaster WITF:
Julia Dunn is a grief expert, and she said there’s a term for what people are going through: disenfranchised loss. Dunn is the clinical director at Olivia’s House, a grief and loss center for children located in York and Adams counties.
A disenfranchised loss is one that’s not widely accepted by societal norms, Dunn said. Her litmus test: Imagine you’re on stage, speaking to a crowd. If you’d feel uncomfortable saying how your loved one died, that’s probably a disenfranchised loss.
Dunn sees it all the time after someone dies from drug use or suicide. A big part of her job is to help children understand what happened, and help parents explain what happened in a non-judgmental way.
With Covid-19 deaths, the dynamic is a bit different, she said. In many cases, it’s not so much that the family is ashamed of how the person died. It’s that, in some cases, they don’t want to admit they were wrong. In some cases, people don’t want to hear others tell them, “I told you so.”
“A family that has lost a loved one to Covid thinks other people might feel superior to them because they didn’t have a loved one die to Covid,” Dunn said.
This lack of consensus around the kind of event we’ve just been through also helps explain, to some extent, the dramatic rise in unruly passengers disrupting air travel. The vast majority of these altercations are started by people rebelling against the FAA’s mask mandate, particularly on flights originating in “a place where local and state leaders have said that the pandemic is a hoax, that masks are not necessary, all of those things,” Sara Nelson, international president of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, told The Washington Post.
The fact is that the pandemic has always been and still remains a collective problem, and distrust, division, and discrimination both prolong it and deepen its harms. As Ed Yong — who just won an incredibly well deserved Pulitzer Prize for his explanatory reporting on the pandemic — put it in a recent essay in The Atlantic: “During a pandemic, no one’s health is fully in their own hands. … An individual’s choices can ripple outward to affect cities, countries, and continents; one sick person can seed a hemisphere’s worth of cases. In turn, each person’s odds of falling ill depend on the choices of everyone around them—and on societal factors, such as poverty and discrimination, that lie beyond their control.”
The tragedy of the last year and a half should have opened our eyes to how deeply interdependent we all are on each other, and how much we owe to one another. And maybe, for some people, it did. But as social life returns, some fractures within society will be deeper and wider than ever.
// Link Roundup
More downsides of Work From Home: A study of 10,000 employees in an IT firm shows that the pandemic-driven shift to Work From Home increased the number of hours employees worked while significantly decreasing their productivity. Employees with children at home suffered the biggest productivity drops, as you might expect. Employees also spent less time networking and less time being coached by their supervisors one-on-one, which could have further negative effects for their careers down the line.
— “Work from Home & Productivity: Evidence from Personnel & Analytics Data on IT Professionals.” Michael Gibbs et al, Becker Friedman Institute for Economics at UChicago working paper series.Lab leak unlikely: To virologists and evolutionary geneticists looking at the SARS-CoV-2 virus itself, all evidence suggests it’s most likely that the pathogen emerged from an animal host, rather than from human intervention in a lab. The virus’s continued evolution over the last year and a half demonstrates that it was not particularly well-adapted to humans when it began spreading rapidly in Wuhan, another strike against the lab-leak hypothesis.
— “We May Never Know Where the Virus Came From. But Evidence Still Suggests Nature.” Angela L. Rasmussen and Stephen A. Goldstein, The Washington Post.About the variants: The viral variant that fueled the catastrophic Covid wave in India earlier this year is as much as 40 percent more transmissible than the first-identified variant of concern, which tore through the U.K. late last year, and which was itself vastly more transmissible than the “wild-type” virus that originally sparked the pandemic. The WHO has set up a new naming scheme for the public to keep better track of the evolution of the virus, so the Indian variant, known by its genetic identifier B.1.617.2, is now better known as the Delta Variant. One thing Delta shows is that while the danger of the pandemic is subsiding for the vaccinated, the danger of infection is actually increasing significantly for vaccinated people.
— “What We Know About the Dangerous Covid B.1.617.2 (Delta) Variant.” Chas Danner and Paola Rosa-Aquino, New York Magazine.Mixing vaccine types: Existing vaccines work quite well against all the existing SARS-CoV-2 variants, but early data suggests that getting two different vaccine types in sequence could induce even stronger protection. Good news for the inevitable round of booster shots we’ll need.
— “Pharma Executives Seeking Higher Immunity Are Mixing Their Covid Shots.” Todd Gillespie, Bloomberg.Masking and distancing worked: People who reported always wearing masks and maintaining social distancing between March 2020 and May 2021 were half as likely to test positive for Covid than people who reported never masking or distancing, according to newly released polling data from Axios. The protective effect of masking and distancing might have been even more pronounced than the polling figures alone suggest — people who didn’t wear masks were also less likely to be tested regularly for the virus.
— “People Who Wore Masks Were Less Likely To Get Sick.” David Nather, Axios.Beating the flu: Transmission of influenza was cut down so significantly in 2020 that one major strain of the virus, H3N2, seems to have been driven to extinction. The decreasing diversity of flu in the human population should make creating effective vaccines easier, since there are fewer strains to protect against. It’s a pleasantly surprising turnaround from earlier fears of a double-stranded Covid/Flu pandemic.
— “A Pandemic Upside: The flu virus became less diverse, simplifying the task of making flu shots.” Helen Branswell, STAT.Disasters widen racial inequality, and so does disaster relief: I wrote at length in the previous issue about how we should be more critical about what disasters are and how they amplify pre-existing inequalities. Here, the Times has a roundup of research showing clear, systemic racial biases in disaster relief.
— “Why Does Disaster Aid Often Favor White People?” Christopher Flavelle, The New York Times.Thirteen minutes with Yo-Yo Ma: I really enjoyed this interview with cellist Yo-Yo Ma, in which he answers questions pulled from Twitter. His answers, even to sometimes weird or off-base questions are insightful, generous, and generative. Just a wonderful little sit-down:
Can I interest you in everything, all of the time? I’m not sure entirely how to describe this 80-minute musical/comedy special by Bo Burnham, which he wrote, performed, shot, and edited by himself in his Los Angeles apartment under the Covid lockdown. Only that it somehow exactly preserves the all-pervasive low-grade insanity of the moment, that it’s an impressive feat of creative work; funny and sometimes beautiful, clever and sort of benignly raunchy. Watch it here on Netflix.
— Inside, Bo Burnham, Netflix.
That’s it for this week! If you’re a first time reader, there’s still time to subscribe, through the box below. I’ll see you two weekends from now in your inbox for our second-to-last regularly scheduled issue.