The Pandemic Blog

WaPo this morning carried an article in which the Massachusetts GOP leader expressed regret for attending one of the White House Hannukah parties. It seems he caught Covid and was hospitalized twice; the second time, he came very close to being put on a ventilator. And his wife, son, daughter in-law and mother in-law all later tested positive, although there’s no mention of the severity of their bouts with Covid, if any. Even worse, Trump didn’t even bother to show up for the party, although he did for the second Hannukah party that day, where he made a brief appearance to state – get ready for this – that the election was riddled with fraud. And do you remember that State Dept. announcement of a big 900-person holiday party? Well, only about 70 people responded they would come, and even fewer came . And I regret to say that Big Mike himself didn’t attend. His reason? The article says “The State Department did not respond to questions about why Pompeo canceled the speech and whet...

A recent Wall Street Journal article told a chilling story about how great a disaster this year has been for the American people, largely because of the current (and thankfully outgoing) administration’s terrible mismanagement of the pandemic. The article was nominally about the CDC’s announcement that life expectancy rose in the US for 2019, to 78.8 years. But at the same time, Last year’s slim gain will be erased by a large drop in longevity when the government releases 2020 figures next year. Mr. Anderson (Robert Anderson, chief of the mortality-statistics branch of the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics) said he performed a simple simulation based on mortality figures through August and found that life expectancy had declined by about 1½ years. For the full year, he expects that life expectancy could fall by two to three years. However, it’s not completely bad news. There have been two years when life expectancy fell more than that: A drop of that magnitude woul...

I didn’t bother to publish numbers today. Both the new deaths and new cases numbers took huge dips over Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, which are of course caused entirely by reporting offices being closed – so it’s inevitable there will be big spikes in both numbers in a few days. I’ll wait for those spikes before publishing them again. If you want to see my most recent numbers, go to my previous post.   On Christmas Eve, the Washington Post published a stunning editorial that pointed out that the Dept. of Health and Human Services is holding back 55% of the coronavirus vaccine doses it has already received from Pfizer, when obviously these could be used immediately. Why are they doing this? You probably know that the Pfizer vaccine requires two doses, recommended to be a month apart. HHS feels that, rather than take the very small chance that Pfizer will run into a big manufacturing problem and will have to drastically cut back production in January, they need to take an...

The Times published a good editorial two days ago about the new coronavirus variant discovered in the UK, that’s caused a lot of European countries to ban travel from the UK. While that is probably necessary for the US to do as well, it does point to one very important problem: The UK is by far the world leader in sequencing the coronavirus genome, whereas the US is something like number 43 on the list. So this variant may well be rampant in the US, and we will never know it until it becomes obvious. In other words, the US needs to ramp up sequencing now, to get a better handle on whether and where the new variant has already gotten a foothold. There are a lot of policy decisions that can’t be made until we have the sequencing data we need. Will the federal government heed the call? You can be sure of one thing: If it’s up to Trump, the answer will be no. The only hope is that a few people at the CDC will stop cowering in fear for their jobs and actually agitate for this – and ...

Remember February? Then there were starting to be warnings that the virus that had devastated Wuhan would find its way here. However, a lot of people (including me) believed the Trump administration’s claims that it had kept the virus out of the US by the “lockdown” on travel from China (although lockdown isn’t the right word, since 27,000 people came here from China – Hong Kong and Macau – in February. And even though 1,600 of those people were supposed to be monitored for virus exposure, the Trump administration was too busy denying that the virus was a threat to do even that. Priorities, priorities!). If the country had done the things it should have done, most notably get testing going quickly as some other countries did, we would be in a lot better shape even today. Now there’s a variant of the virus spreading rapidly in England, and it’s already in South Africa and on the European continent (especially France); in fact, the majority of new cases in the UK are caused by this var...

Julie McCullough, the friend who alerted me a few weeks ago to a study (that I wrote a post about) that seemed to show the widely-used MMR vaccine provides protection against Covid-19, sent another email to me this week. This time, it included a link to a much more conclusive study that indicates very strongly that the MMR vaccine confers immunity to Covid. She also linked a page that lists a number of other studies – and 25 news reports – that confirm this conclusion. The nice thing about most of these studies is the authors didn’t have to go out and vaccinate thousands of people. All they had to do was compare data between different populations with different rates of MMR vaccination and compare rates of Covid deaths. The correlations are really striking. I must admit I didn’t get my MMR vaccine yet, but I will try tomorrow!   The MMR vaccine is supposed to be given in two doses, but the second dose conveys at most an increase of 10% in effectiveness over the first. So I...

The Atlantic ’s daily newsletter had a great embedded article yesterday. I’m reproducing it in full (the newsletter is free to everybody anyway, although you do need to subscribe to see articles beyond a certain number. I highly recommend you subscribe, since they’ve provided some of the best coverage of the election and especially the pandemic). I’m sure you’ll agree this is quite remarkable. BTW, Ron Klain is the incoming White House Chief of Staff. It is a truism in journali sm that predicting the future is perilous, mainly because it hasn’t happened yet. So when we publish articles that, over time, prove their prescience, attention ought to be paid.   In late January, at a moment when most of us could not imagine that 2020 would soon come to resemble 1918,  The Atlantic  published an article by Ron Klain titled, “ Coronavirus Is Coming—And Trump Isn’t Ready .” Our Ideas editor, Yoni Appelbaum, had asked Klain, then a private citize...