The View from the Hermitage, Day 322

Forty-six weeks, and we're about to enter the month of some "lasts" for me. Last trip away from Virginia not to mention last trip via airplane: a gathering of my Internet quilt guild in San Antonio, Texas, February 19 to 24. Last dinner in a restaurant: February 28, to mark our 35th wedding anniversary. We ate at the inn at which we held our wedding reception in 1985. I think it's the fanciest restaurant at which I've ever eaten. February held the last times I've seen a couple of dear friends. March holds several more lasts, but March won't be here for four weeks. 

As for the pandemic that has caused all of us to have various lasts, transmission of the novel coronavirus appears to be slowing. The average number of new cases on January 29 was 40 percent lower than three weeks earlier. Covid hospitalizations are the lowest they've been in two months. Let's not get complacent, though, since we could see 100,000 to 150,000 more deaths in the coming two months. The British variant form of coronavirus could become the prominent strain in the US in a mere six to 14 weeks. When that happens, one infectious disease specialist says, "...we are going to see something like we have not seen yet in this country."

As I said, we should not get complacent. We may now have multiple vaccines against the coronavirus, but we have few new treatments. All the attention and money went toward vaccine development rather than treatment such as antivirals to stop the disease early in its progression. Even after I get vaccinated, I plan to be obsessively careful. My knee replacement came about in large part because I fall into the 30 to 40 percent of people for whom hyaluronic acid will not work as an arthritis treatment. I really don't want to find out the hard way that I am also in the percentage of people in whom one coronavirus vaccine or another does not work. I'm living for the day there are decent treatments to go along with viable vaccines. 

Looking worldwide, I found a reference to an October 2019 document assessing the pandemic preparedness of 153 countries, Global Health Security Index: Building Collective Action and Accountability. You probably would not have been surprised to see that when the report came out, The US ranked first and the UK ranked second in terms of how prepared a nation was for a pandemic. Would it surprise you to learn that right now, only eight of the 153 countries have death rates worse than the US, and the UK is one of those? 

How did the pandemic get to the point it's now at? The two big factors (I am not coming up with these but borrowing them from today's Axios AM email) were the Chinese failure to contain the virus and their attempts to cover it up, and the failure of the US to take on a global leadership role. Perhaps Xpot's acknowledgement that the coronavirus was real and not likely to just disappear by April or any other time would have been a good starting point. Resistance to the notion that reopening the economy was more important than public health would have helped as well. New case rates were going in the right direction at least in the states where there was some nontrivial notion of a lockdown. Reopening even partway? We're in a worse place now than we were last spring. 

Finally as far as the pandemic goes, repeat after me: "No one is safe until everyone is safe." The US is not so far doing much to help vaccinate the third world. There have been reports that there may not be enough vaccine doses for true global coverage until 2023. I have no epidemiology training, but it seems to me that it would be harder for the first world to achieve herd immunity as long as a person with the virus is only a flight or a voyage away. I hope we don't get so involved in getting ourselves vaccinated that we make the third world wait until 2023, because we'd probably be waiting that long to be safe ourselves.

As for the current winner in the front page, above the fold contest, five of Xpot's lawyers for the second impeachment trial have quit, apparently over what strategy(ies) to use in his defense. One report cited Xpot's insistence on using only one argument, that he can't be impeached because he is no longer in office. Another report cited Xpot's insistence on using as a defense that he was the victim of a stolen election. Finally, just for chuckles, Xpot is supposed to have fumed in front of aides that the case is simple enough he could defend himself and save the money he'd have to pay lawyer(s). When the aides picked their jaws up off the floor, they apparently talked him out of this one for now ... they hope.