Everybody on Twitter is talking about the “Bad Art Friend” article in the NYT. I can’t believe the Times gave the author such a high word count for an asinine story.
The Catholic Church will not survive this.
Back in school after 18-months of remote education, kids are exhibiting behavior problems. Is anyone shocked?
On Instagram, I am addicted to the quirky runner, Erin Azar. Paula Sutton, my other Instagram addiction, pointed me to some super fancy Scottish sweaters and now I want one. Even though I just bought two sweaters that were on major sale at J. Crew.
We’re in a housing crisis. Here in the older suburbs, which are carefully guarded from new growth by residents eager to protect home values and school quality, we are starting to see more growth. I’ll write about those politics soon.
Picture: I only buy books at estates sales, but sometimes I pause just to admire the art of the estate sale ladies as they arrange the sale. More pictures here.
Apt. 11d 
Fun to look at those books. I hope they all find a home that loves them.
I have a friend who sells the kind of dishes/pewter other items you picture here on her etsy shop. She has a good eye for items and enjoys acquiring and finding homes. But, she says she has to resist wanting to keep things for herself.
Recently, she was selling a beautiful pewter teapot only to find after being asked its weight and shipping costs that her buyer wanted to melt it to make bullets!
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My round-up:
–Several dozen Sacramento-area school children remain stuck in Afghanistan:
https://www.sacbee.com/news/local/article254412638.html
–The ISIS bomber who killed 13 US service members and 169 Afghans and injured many more at the airport in Kabul had apparently escaped from Bagram prison after the US withdrawal from Bagram Air Base in early July.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/06/politics/kabul-airport-attacker-prison/index.html
So you can now draw a very direct line from the US decision to prematurely give up Bagram to the dozens of deaths on August 26 less than two months later, a decision which was made contrary to military advice.
–A number of Nordic countries are tapping the brakes on mRNA vaccines for younger people.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-10-06/sweden-halts-moderna-s-covid-vaccine-for-people-aged-30-or-under?srnd=markets-vp
“The Swedish health authority Wednesday cited new data on the increased risk of heart inflammation [from Moderna] as a reason for the pause for those aged 30 and under. Denmark will stop giving the shot to those younger than 18.”
“The Norwegian Institute of Public Health cited new data from Ontario, Canada, as well as from Norway, Sweden and other countries in recommending that men under 30 consider choosing the Pfizer jab.”
–In happier news, the US is purchasing $1 billion in home rapid COVID tests
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/10/06/covid-delta-variant-live-updates/
and the FDA has (finally!) approved another home rapid COVID test:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/10/06/covid-delta-variant-live-updates/
This should hopefully ease the current supply crunch and help bring down prices.
A good supply of home rapid tests could make the holiday/travel season a lot safer for everybody.
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It would have been really helpful if the Biden administration had kept up enough rapid home test orders so that Abbott kept up their production this summer.
https://www.dailyherald.com/news/20210602/abbott-closes-gurnee-plant-lets-go-2000-workers-as-demand-for-covid-19-tests-drops
(That was a story from early June 2021.)
It would also have be nice if the FDA would at least run at Euro-speed with regard to approving companies’ rapid COVID tests. We have very, very few home tests approved and very little supply compared to various European countries and the UK.
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Data on similar issues presented to FDA before decision on boosters. There are real issues starting to present with the vaccines. I am glad I don’t have young kids because based on what we are seeing no fucking way would my child get it. Comirnaty is not the same vaccine, it is unprecedented what the FDA has done*, and the way Pfizer-Biontech unblinded the phase 3 is just bizarre. (Note that British med journals have published multiple editorials that are basically WTF?!)
I am vaccinated, and I would get it again based on my risk factors. But the push to vaccinate absolutely everyone, even those who already had it, is becoming nuts.
And bluntly, I don’t want to hear a word about SCIENCE if all you have are tables from the CDC. we are doing actual science, and it’s messy and complicated and ambiguous – and it will stay that way because of Pfizer-Biontech behavior and the way Covid cases and hospitalizations and deaths are defined.
*we’re searching for any examples, with biologics, where they just declare something the same – usually batch after batch is tested, etc. This is truly unprecedented.
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It is literally impossible to rebut or counter every bit of bullshit that comes down the pike about vaccines. Things get invented or excerpts get taken out of context as part of a deliberate, coordinated propaganda campaign and have been ever since it became clear Trump wasn’t going to coup his way back. Unless you make it a full-time job to research things, you have only the choice to participate in the wave of bullshit by amplifying it or not. Obviously, Zuckerberg had more choices, so here we are.
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Some of the MDs I follow on twitter think that a one-dose protocol may be a good compromise for teenage boys–get close to full immunity benefits while avoiding nearly all myocarditis risk. That one-dose option somehow never finds its way into a CDC chart…
Aside from one dose versus two doses, there’s also the question of dose size, as well as spacing. Bigger spacing seems to be better in terms of long-term effectiveness.
https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/spacing-pfizer-covid-shots-boosts-antibody-levels-after-initial-drop-study-2021-07-22/
I feel pretty good about planning one dose of mRNA vaccine for our 3rd grader and then playing it by ear with regard to a second dose–might do it, might not do it.
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I agree. Which is why, unless you are actually talking to health departments and understanding how they categorize data and how things have changed between for example may 2020 and may 2021. I’m not going to listen to you
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Really I don’t understand how the concerns here are useful. If I’m not to use the CDC, should I use Sweden’s recommendations instead? Amy’s links? Tulip’s unclear references and personal what I would do but don’t have to opinion.
I think I have no real choice but to go with the CDC even while understanding their imperfections.
Ultimately I think I’m for mandates and more robust coverage in the vaccine compensation system (not treating the current vaccines specially, but conferring the protections we have for the other vaccines)
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bj wrote, “If I’m not to use the CDC, should I use Sweden’s recommendations instead?”
It was Sweden AND Denmark AND Norway.
Also, Finland now has concerns.
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/finland-pauses-use-moderna-covid-19-vaccine-young-men-2021-10-07/
“Mika Salminen, director of the Finnish health institute, said [that instead of Moderna] Finland would instead give Pfizer’s vaccine to men born in 1991 and later. Finland offers shots to people aged 12 and over.”
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-57888429
The UK is also acting cautiously. The BBC writes,
“Last month, the UK’s chief medical officers recommended a single Pfizer dose for all 12 to 15-year-olds.”
“Is the vaccine compulsory?
No. When the recommendation was made, Prof Chris Whitty, Chief Medical Officer for England, said the vaccination would be an “offer”.
He said young people and their parents needed to be supported, and there should be no stigma attached to their choice.”
“The chief medical officers say that a second dose should not be considered before the spring term.
However, 12- to 15-year-olds will have two doses if they’re at higher risk…”
If you count them up, that’s a lot of peer countries proceeding much more cautiously than ourselves.
Truth be told, I do have more trust in British public health guidance than our own, because they have shown a lot more competence over the past year than our CDC and FDA with regard to the following things: running studies on COVID drugs, getting home rapid tests into the hands of residents, pursuing a very effective first doses first policy in the spring, getting 73% of their population vaccinated with first doses, moving toward test-and-stay for school children as opposed to lengthy quarantines, keeping mortality down despite very high case rates, etc. The Brits really know what they’re doing, and if our policies differ from theirs, we should ask ourselves if our policies make sense.
Oh, yeah, and they don’t mask elementary school students, while in the US, the CDC recommendation is masking for kids 2-and-up in daycare.
https://www.10news.com/news/in-depth/in-depth-young-kids-in-the-u-k-dont-wear-masks-at-school
The US CDC and FDA have lost their way, and in a more functional political environment, there would be consequences for all their foot-dragging, politics-playing, and general incompetence.
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Ooh, if we’re using the Scandinavians to guide our vaccine decision making, can we adopt their health care and social network systems, too? And, Britain’s national health care?
I do think that the US authorities are taking into account the risk of COVID to that subgroup as well as the risk of the vaccine (as they did in authorizing the booster). From what I can tell of the booster decision, a guide was that for <65 year (without obesity, diabetes, or other common risk factors) olds, the threat of serious infection was low enough that the risk of a booster was a balancing factor. The same decision should be made with vaccinating other groups.
I do have less respect for the CDC and FDA (and do not blame all of the failures on the tightrope they walked to deal with Trump's utter incompetence and egotism) but I don't think that Norway, Finland, Sweden, and Denmark can guide our health decisions (their demographics, health, and health care systems are too different from ours, which, incidentally is also a reason why I don't pay much attention when their models of social safety networks and work protections are cited as a model for us, either).
Britain is closer as a potential decision making model, but they haven't done better than the US in my book (except potentially for the lesser vaccine resistance). And, that vaccine resistance plays a significant role in the difference in decision making for the US — if we could get 99% vaccination in the rest of the population, it would be less necessary to vaccinate the children.
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bj said, “Ooh, if we’re using the Scandinavians to guide our vaccine decision making, can we adopt their health care and social network systems, too? And, Britain’s national health care?”
–If the Scandis are doing it, we may not want to do exactly the same thing, but it means it’s not crazy or anti-vaxx to have a look at what they are doing.
–I forgot to mention that the UK was also much faster at doing genetic sequencing to figure out outbreaks and who infected who. There’s no reason that we couldn’t have at least tried to do something similar, given the trillions of dollars that the US spent on fighting COVID and COVID relief.
–The UK health establishment seems to have been a lot more results-oriented and a lot less political than our own and has had a really good 2021. It would be nice if there were some easy way to copy that, but I’m not sure there is.
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bj wrote, “I do have less respect for the CDC and FDA (and do not blame all of the failures on the tightrope they walked to deal with Trump’s utter incompetence and egotism) but I don’t think that Norway, Finland, Sweden, and Denmark can guide our health decisions (their demographics, health, and health care systems are too different from ours, which, incidentally is also a reason why I don’t pay much attention when their models of social safety networks and work protections are cited as a model for us, either).”
I don’t know that the exact Scandi approach is right, but if they think that there is reason to be concerned about Moderna in certain demographics (young people and young males), then it’s worth looking into rather than doing the thing that we do over here of yelling louder at people when they’re worried. It causes more anxiety and distrust when certain segments of the public start thinking that the CDC and FDA would push mass vaccination for the public good no matter what the individual risk. And yes, that’s what we’re dealing with–that the CDC and FDA are seen as being willing to say anything if it gets the job done. Refusing to account for natural immunity also makes people mad and distrustful.
If I had to bet, I suspect that the Brits are doing the right thing here with doing single doses for 12-15, just as they were doing the right thing when they went for first-doses-first for adults this spring and did a big spacing between doses.
“Britain is closer as a potential decision making model, but they haven’t done better than the US in my book (except potentially for the lesser vaccine resistance). And, that vaccine resistance plays a significant role in the difference in decision making for the US — if we could get 99% vaccination in the rest of the population, it would be less necessary to vaccinate the children.”
They did have a worse time than us in 2020, but they are doing a lot better now with regard to mortality, despite the fact that their case levels are higher. (The UK is dumping rapid tests on the public by the truck-load, though, so it’s possible that their higher numbers are just a difference in testing.) Adjusting for populating size, I believe UK mortality is less than 1/3 the US’s right now.
Low 70s for vaccination looks like it’s a pretty good place, at least this time of year. The winter is probably going to push that up, but having a lot of rapid tests could help a lot.
Vaccine-willingness has a lot to do with citizens’ confidence in the public health establishment, which in turn has a lot to do with how the public health establishment has behaved during the pandemic toward the public. The US public health establishment did a lot of bad stuff in 2020-2021, is still doing bad stuff, and has been unwilling to apologize or admit that it was ever wrong or how much it hurt people.
Also, there’s been this very unpleasant pattern of scapegoating the public, even when certain strategies clearly aren’t working. The public health authorities can never fail, they can only be failed by the public…
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Isn’t myocarditis a risk of covid-19 as well as the vaccine? If I had kids under 18, they would receive the vaccine the absolute second they were eligible. This disease is incredibly destructive to many, many organs in the body, and it is very likely an entire generation of infected children will have increased rates of neurological, respiratory, and circulatory disease throughout their lifetime and overall lower life expectancy. That was true of the generation that lived through the 1918 flu.
My husband and I are both getting our boosters next weekend, and I will be arranging my oldest daughter’s booster (she is working in a preschool, so qualifies) shortly after. My suburban friends who are eligible by age, condition, or occupation are all getting their boosters and my fellow professors are getting them. The arguments given by the advisory group (ACIP) against offering the booster to almost all adults were very poor, not based on safety concerns but on utilitarian ones, mainly having to do with third world vaccine equity and the greater benefit gained by the population when unvaxxed individuals get their first shot than when vaxxed individuals receive their booster. Since I as an individual have absolutely no control over vaccinations being sent abroad or antivaxxers receiving their first shot, my health should not be held hostage to those events. ACIP has no plan to make those things happen either, and as such they are merely virtue signaling. The anti-booster crowd in ACIP, the CDC, and the FDA lost all credibility with me when they decided the end goal should not be prevention of disease, but prevention of death. Being sick enough to miss three weeks of work (as a secretary, youngish and vaccinated, did on my campus did recently), sick enough to be hospitalized (which would be a terrifying event for my children), losing my taste and smell, risking long-term complications–all of these are my goal, along with avoiding death. ACIP had a chart at the meeting that said that boosters would prevent huge numbers of hospitalizations. How dare they say there is no medical interest in preventing large numbers of horrible life-changing events that are costly, painful, and terrifying for family members?Really, if that’s their reasoning, why on earth do they think I should get a flu shot every year? Haven’t they undermined their own reasoning entirely, in order to make the asinine point that we should deal with the antivaxxers? And lest you think I’m the only one horrified, read medical professionals/virologists/etc. on twitter.
Israel and the UK have it right on boosters, the CDC and FDA will come around and open them up to all adults within months, and this will become either a three-dose vaccine, a two-dose vaccine with a delayed second dose, or a yearly shot. People shouldn’t have to suffer in the meantime because of ill-thought out ethical concerns.
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Is the third dose enough to make you magnetic?
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Is the third dose enough to make you magnetic?
Maybe if I get the third dose I will finally be able to link the microchip to my EZPass.
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Re Bad Art Friend – some people never leave junior high.
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Tulip, you’re right. The story has more than 1800 comments, so it did strike a nerve. What’s odd is that some of the comments seem to be from the plagiarist’s friends, trying to make their case that the low-status kidney donor is “weird.”
They are thereby displaying their lack of civility.
If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.
Nothing online is private.
Treat others as you would be treated.
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I find the whole thing sad. An awkward needy woman who suffered trauma is still trying to prove to herself that she didn’t deserve the things that happened to her. (Look, I’m a good person, I gave a kidney.) She creates a small Facebook group -twenty some people -and invites those she thinks are her friends. But they aren’t, and they’re really shitty people.
One of them writes an intentionally cruel story about the donor’s experience. I say intentionally cruel because she made sure others in their mutual circle knew she was mocking the donor. And even though the writer says they were never friends, she used that friendship against the donor by saying a friend would give her artistic freedom and trust.
Donor tries to make sure everyone knows what a shitty person the writer is because she’s awkward and needy and naive enough to think people might care and validate that she didn’t deserve that sort of treatment if only they knew. But they don’t care and donor goes off the deep end.
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Elizabeth Bruenig has an Atlantic piece that settled on part of why I think the NYTimes story works: the characterizations of the donor, by herself (which resembles Tulip’s summary here), by the short story writer (who interpreted her as an attention seeking, demanding person who wants all stories to center around her and weighs down others with her needs), and by the NY Times author (“His own sympathies seem to shift back and forth between the two litigants, which has the effect of casting Dorland in light and then shadow, light and then shadow. Is she a genuinely kind if damaged person standing up for herself against a ring of successful and fashionable authors who consider her a nobody? Or is she a manipulative creep in a kind soul’s clothing? “)
My interaction with this story is very intellectual — I certainly don’t identify with the donor (though I have almost always been an outsider), and I also don’t identify with the cool clique (mind you, it can be hard to identify that you’re in the cool clique, if you really are — you just think you have a community). So, I am kind of enjoying the intellectualized discussion of the story (and am fascinated that my teen boy found the story fascinating, too — and actually came to find me to discuss it after reading it).
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She actually gave a kidney, so….Does it matter why?
The whole she’s doing it for the wrong reasons comes from Larson after she says she’ll be in the parade. The kidney organization would have invited her and it makes good sense from their standpoint, especially since she gave a non directed. What’s wrong with being excited? She could both do this for pure reasons and still be excited about representing the organization.
I think I am team Dorland because I have a friend who donated a kidney to an acquaintance of his and I know it was driven in part by my friend’s wrestling with whether or not he is a good person. He’s former military and had multiple tours in Afghanistan. I also just generally hate bullies and Larson et al are bullies.
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Regarding my copyright comment — the donor’s modified words were used in the story to parody her character. Definitely the kind of copyright case that I believe suppresses speech.
“if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all” is not, I suspect, a philosophy followed by any but the most insipid of writers. Are we allowed to say unnice things about celebrities? Politicians?
Not people one might want to be friends with, and especially not people you would want to follow up with because they didn’t like your post!
(Wonder if the comments at the NYTimes are different now — when I read, it seemed like a lot of comments like yours, not supporting the short story writer (unlike in my Twitter feed, where there is widespread dislike of the donor, especially by those who have taken workshops with her.)
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The donor counter sued. I think that matters. Also, there is a difference between public figures and non public figures.
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If insipid means not suffering the reputational damage of being associated with mean girl behavior, there’s an upside to that. It is like high school, with the added fillip that writers are very insecure these days. It’s interesting that Twitter feed is filled with people piling on. They’re trying to join the “popular” crowd.
Before the internet, tearing down someone’s character could be done over dinner or drinks. It didn’t leave behind a written record, waiting to be retrieved by a lawyer. Said written record includes essentially an admission that the short story writer did aim the story at the kidney donor. “Parody” is too kind, I think. Admitting in print that she used the donor’s letter in question is a mistake. Nothing remains private.
Are we allowed to say unnice things about celebrities? Politicians? Sure. People do all the time. However, TANSTAAFL applies. Solidifying the in-group by dissecting the character of an acquaintance who’s trying to gain social prominence through kidney donation was satisfying at the moment, I’m sure.
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I’m pretty sure that the reputational damage of being in the mean girl crowd is not a significant issue for a writer. I think people are actually usually surprised when they hear that a writer is a nice person.
I do think that using words too close to the donor’s own was a mistake and gave a tool that can be legally weaponized (and was, in the form of cancelling the Boston One Story). I think the author will probably me more closely scrutinized in the future. But, if I would not be surprised if she’s shopping a book with a needy and demanding kidney donor (she doesn’t have to use the words or any details of the Dorland story).
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I’m not disagreeing that they were mean. I just disagree that there is or should be a legal remedy to their meanness. It’s classic therapy stuff. You can’t change other people’s behavior and make them be like you want them to be.
And I really don’t think copyright law should be used to cancel a work in a case like this one (or the repeated contact of workshops, managers, etc.). I’d feel differently if Dorland had written an eloquent poem about her experience and the author lifted it.
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The tide has turned on twitter. People are sharing the court documents, which make it clear that the stalker was the short story writer, who reported back to her friends all the things the donor was saying in the Facebook group so they could carp and complain about how awful she was. They had a nickname for her–her initials with the letter f, standing for “f-ing,” in the middle. These are people with whom she had professional relationships (she taught at grubhub for a while), to whom she had done nothing other than be annoying and “cringy,” at an institution where she had been a student and paid money. She wrote the story for the express purpose of attacking the donor–she admits this in group chats!–with the donor’s actual first name included in early drafts and changed to Rose in later drafts because she had been in the Rose Parade. The virtually exact wording of the letter was used in an earlier published version of the story–to the point where she asked Audible (in the court documents–this isn’t hearsay) if she could re-record her story with revisions to eliminate the evidence of her plagiarism.
Finally, kidney donor groups are apparently quite incensed by the idea that it is narcissistic to donate an organ (!) According to what I read, the “cringy” letter was something that she was asked to write specifically for the purpose of encouraging others to donate–she wasn’t tooting her own horn, she was trying to evangelize for living donation. I think that’s what bothered them–that she was a zealous do-gooder. I understand being annoyed by hypocrites who pretend to be zealous do-gooders, and I know nowadays we’re all cynical and assume that all do-gooders are actually hypocrites, but she actually did something really wonderful.
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I actually got myself another cup of coffee and a cookie to settle in to read the Bad Art Friend article. I’m not sure why, before I read the article, I didn’t know what it would be, but something about made me think it would be a good story. And it was good.
But my non voyeuristic/dark interest is in copyrights, which comes up in a significant way in this story. I’ve had a longstanding interest in copyright law that started when the congress, under the influence of Disney, increased copyright protections, retroactively, from 75 years to 95 years (for corporate works). The vagaries of copyright law became even more complicated and the ability to use copyright to suppress new work. One big problem was the fear of publishers of their own liability which induced them to make very narrow interpretations of fair use, parody, ownership issues. For example, some copy shops refused to copy family photographs because, technically, the copyright of photographs belong to the photographer, not the subjects. But finding that copyright holder can be near impossible for many photographs.
So, I have an interest in what I think are too narrow interpretations of copyright law that result in the restriction of new work. Often narrow interpretations are settlements, or publishers refusing to distribute the book (the Catcher in the Rye “sequel” received an unfavorable ruling in the US courts and was suppressed here — through a settlement). Copyright law then becomes an a tool for suppressing ideas art, or even bad parodies (most people say the Rye sequel is bad).
My university once used copyright law to harass animal rights activists who were harassing scientists on campus; their campaign, funded by a national group, used the university mascot the No that headed their science. The mascot was copyrighted, and the university got a ruling/settlement that required the organization to go paste a new N on all their posters. At the time, it was fun, but I can’t actually support it as a method of shutting down activism.
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I’ve been complaining for a long time that there have been no COVID vaccine ads on the radio. I have the radio on all the time when I drive, and I’ve heard only a handful on the radio since the spring, none state or federally funded. I’m much likely to hear Alex Berenson or the anti-COVID vaxx doctor who claims to have invented mRNA vaccines on the radio.
I finally heard a gut-punch ad today that was funded by a local hospital chain. There was a woman talking about how she and her husband were unsure about getting vaccinated, and then her husband got sick. By the time she filmed the interview, he had been in the hospital for a very long time. After that, the ad said that her husband died 6 days after she record the message. Kind of late, though…
My college student reports that there are enough vaccine ads on youtube “to be annoying.” Earlier this summer, she said that there was one that answered the question, is it safe, by replying brightly that Dr. Fauci says that it’s safe!
I’ve also yet to be offered a vaccination by a healthcare provider.
As the Simpson’s character put it, I’ve tried nothing, and I’m all out of ideas.
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Not sure — there are you tube vaccine ads; I see lots of vaccine PSAs on my twitter. A public health person I follow on twitter is starting a focus group to understand vaccine resistance of parents of younger children; there’s a Baltimore youth voices project on vaccines.
Lots is being tried. If there’s a specific niche that’s missing (radio ads on specific stations), why not try to make it happen? Letters to your representatives? local hospitals? departments of health?
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I finally heard a federal COVID vaccine ad from Health and Human Services on the radio.
I’m kind of mad at them, though, because it was a “do it for the kids” type ad. This is bad both because a) it’s misleading with regard to how much danger kids are in from COVID (a typical unvaccinated kid is in less danger than a typical vaccinated adult) and b) because a lot of vaccine-hesitant people are aware that there’s a radical fall-off in risk among the young. Being misleading and manipulative about the level of risk for kids undermines the credibility of the overall pro-vaccine message.
Meh.
Maybe I shouldn’t have been complaining about the lack of a federal ad…
In happier news, I’m listening to Jonah Goldberg’s podcast interview with Scott Gottlieb, who has a book out on the pandemic response. The podcast episode is entitled “The Full Gottlieb” and the good stuff begins about 15 minutes in.
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Just watched Netflix’s”Pretty Smart” Chelsea runs into Margot and now have another take on the bad art friend. Margot is all the mean girls in one and comes to vaunt her book over Chelsea’s and Chelsea and friends set up an elaborate charade to convince Margot that Chelsea has a book under contract. Hilarity and much pettiness ensue.
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This is a really interesting piece:
https://reason.com/2021/10/08/new-york-city-is-hiding-its-k-12-enrollment-decline/
NYC is dragging its feet on divulging K-12 enrollment numbers, presumably because they are really bad.
“Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), the country’s second-largest, saw its enrollment drop by a shocking 6 percent at the beginning of the 2021-22 school year, after declining 4 percent the year before that. The LAUSD, one of the country’s most-closed big-city systems in 2020–21 despite Southern California’s temperate weather, has the nation’s most aggressive COVID-19 testing regime (every student and staffer, every week, regardless of vaccination status), plus vaccine mandates on teachers and students aged 12 and older.”
Some of those families may have left. I see a lot of California plates.
“New York City K-12 enrollment declined at least 4 percent in 2020–21, even while charter schools increased by more than 7 percent. The nationwide enrollment decline, apparent in all 50 states, was 3 percent. Homeschooling in the meantime has doubled.”
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45,000 out of 380,000 VA workers working “in or near” healthcare haven’t gotten around to presenting proof of COVID vaccination and the agency has had to give them an extra 10 day grace period.
https://www.govexec.com/workforce/2021/10/today-vaccination-deadline-day-380k-va-employees-45k-still-havent-said-theyve-gotten-shots/185976/
Moreover, unvaccinated VA workers still have the option of putting in paperwork for religious and medical exceptions, which will presumably take a while to work through. (I have a relative who works in HR who says that a resistant employee could burn up months slow-walking a religious exception through the system.)
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/12/southwest-airlines-reduces-cancellations-after-mass-cancellations-from-staffing-shortage.html
Southwest Airlines cancelled 2,400 flights over the last several days due to a combination of weather, air traffic control and staffing problems.
Meanwhile, the US has 10.9 million unfilled job openings.
And I don’t even have to tell you all about the ongoing weirdness of the supply chain situation.
My sister has a shop, and she says that vendors keep swearing that they can deliver, followed by delays. She’s been told that on the Asia side, there are bidding wars going for containers, with buyers paying crazy sums to get their goods delivered.
That has to be translating into higher costs for manufactured goods.
I’ve been planning to go see family in WA over Thanksgiving, but I’m wondering if that isn’t too risky, given current conditions.
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David Leonhardt of the NYT has some interesting stuff:
“Nationwide statistics from England show an even larger age skew. Children under 12 (a group that’s combined with teenagers in this chart) appear to be at less risk than vaccinated people in their 40s if not 30s.”
“Data from Seattle shows that the risks for unvaccinated children look similar to the risks for vaccinated people in their 50s.”
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