Category: Current Events

This is great, although imperfect because of the breakthrough cases, but take it for what it is.

I've had a few interactions recently with people who refuse to get the Covid vaccine. One of their arguments is the 99% survival rate. I came up with this analogy.

You are given two choices. The first choice is to go into a room with 99 other people and draw a marble from a box.

60 people draw a blue marble. A large man then smacks them on the side of the head with a cupped first and says they can leave. It hurts, but it wears off quickly.

30 draw a red marble. They get worked over a bit more—black eye, bloody nose, split lip. But they walk out under their own steam and heal within a week.

9 draw a yellow marble. They get the shit stomped out of them. They do not walk out under their own power. Their injuries take months to heal, and some will never be back to normal.

1 draws a green marble. He's killed—slowly, clumsily. If he's lucky, he passes out before the shades permanently go down.

The 2nd choice? Don't go into the room at all.

Why would anyone pick the first option?

~John Mathews

Goodbye, and Good Riddance

"If you want to leave, take good care, hope you make a lot of nice friends out there." ~ from "Wild World" by Cat Stevens

This is for those of you who've chosen to quit your jobs rather than submit to a vaccine mandate.

No telling how many of you there actually are, but lately, you're all over the news. Just last week, a nearly-30-year veteran of the San Jose Police Department surrendered his badge rather than comply with the city's requirement that all employees be inoculated against covid-19. He joins an Army lieutenant colonel, some airline employees, a Major League Baseball executive, the choral director of the San Francisco Symphony, workers at the tax collector's office in Orange County, Fla., and, incredibly, dozens of health care professionals.

Well, on behalf of the rest of us, the ones who miss concerts, restaurants and other people's faces, the ones who are sick and tired of living in pandemic times, here's a word of response to you quitters: Goodbye.

And here's two more: Good riddance.

Not to minimize any of this. A few weeks ago, a hospital in upstate New York announced it would have to "pause" delivering babies because of resignations among its maternity staff. So the threat of difficult ramifications is certainly real. But on the plus side, your quitting goes a long way toward purging us of the gullible, the conspiracy-addled, the logic-impaired and the stubbornly ignorant. And that's not nothing.

We've been down this road before. Whenever faced with some mandate imposed in the interest of the common good, some of us act like they just woke up on the wrong side of the Berlin Wall. "There's no freedom no more," whined one man in a video that recently aired on "The Daily Show With Trevor Noah." The clip was from the 1980s, and the guy had just gotten a ticket for not wearing his seatbelt.

It's an unfortunately common refrain. Can't smoke in a movie theater? Can't crank your music to headache decibels at 2 in the morning? Can't post the Ten Commandments in a courtroom? "There's no freedom no more." Some of you seem to think freedom means no one can be compelled to do, or refrain from doing, anything. But that's not freedom, it's anarchy.

Usually, the rest of us don't agonize over your intransigence. Often it has no direct impact on us. The guy in "The Daily Show" clip was only demanding the right to skid across a highway on his face, after all. But now you claim the right to risk the health care system and our personal lives.

So if you're angry, guess what? You're not the only ones.

The difference is, your anger is dumb, and ours is not. Yours is about being coerced to do something you don't want to do. Like that's new. Like you're not already required to get vaccinated to start school or travel to other countries. For that matter, you're also required to mow your lawn, cover your hindparts and, yes, wear a seatbelt. So you're mad at government and your job for doing what they've always done.

But the rest of us, we're mad at you. Because this thing could have been over by now, and you're the reason it isn't.

That's why we were glad President Biden stopped asking nicely, started requiring vaccinations everywhere he had power to do so. We also were glad when employers followed suit. And if that's a problem for you, then, yes, goodbye, sayonara, auf wiedersehen, adios and adieu. We'll miss you, to be sure. But you're asking us to choose between your petulance and our lives.

And that's really no choice at all.

Leonard Pitts Jr. is a national columnist for The Miami Herald and the winner of a Pulitzer Prize for commentary.

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And bordering on genocide.

From arstechnica:

COVID-19 cases in children have risen 30-fold since late June and are now at record highs, with nearly 500,000 new child cases reported in the past two weeks, according to the latest data released by the American Academy of Pediatrics on Monday. Pediatric cases have "increased exponentially," the AAP said in a statement.

The rise coincides with a dramatic surge in overall COVID-19 transmission driven by the hypertransmissible delta variant. But with more adults vaccinated, children are getting hit harder in this wave than ever before, and they make up a larger and larger share of the cases.

At this point, the US has recorded 5.3 million cumulative cases in children, accounting for 15.5 percent of total cases in the pandemic. That percentage has risen steadily during the current surge, up from 14.2 percent at the end of June.

By late June, child cases had steeply declined and reached a low point, with children making up just about 10 percent of the total cases during the week ending on June 24. Amid the delta surge, that weekly percentage shot up. In the week ending on September 9, children made up 29 percent of cases. For context, children (those under age 18) only make up 22.2 percent of the US population.

With the growing share of cases, raw totals in children are now at their highest levels ever in the pandemic. In the week ending on September 9, the US tallied 243,373 pediatric cases (from 49 states, plus New York City, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and Guam). That weekly tally is second only to the previous week, ending on September 2, in which states reported 251,781 pediatric cases.

Protecting children

Before the delta surge, the highest weekly tally was set in the week ending on January 14, in which there were 211,466 cases in children. From there, cases fell to a low of 8,447 in the week ending on June 24. The current weekly cases are a 30-fold jump from that point.

About half of the country's pediatric cases reported in the past two weeks have been tallied in Southern states, where many areas are undervaccinated and transmission has been extremely high.

Children under the age of 12 are not yet eligible for vaccination. However, data continues to show that vaccinating older children and adults around young children can protect them from infection. States with higher vaccination coverage overall have generally seen fewer cases, emergency visits, and hospitalizations involving children during the current surge.

US officials expect that vaccines will become available for children ages 5 to 11 sometime between the end of October and the end of the year. Vaccines for children ages 6 months to 5 years will follow.

One bright spot among the current data is that child hospitalizations and deaths from COVID-19 remain relatively low. Among the 24 states that report pediatric hospitalizations, pediatric hospitalizations ranged from 1.6 percent to 4 percent of total COVID hospitalizations over the entire pandemic. And according to mortality data from 45 states, children have made up zero percent to 0.27 percent of all COVID-19 deaths during the pandemic. Seven states have reported no deaths in children throughout the pandemic.

"At this time, it appears that severe illness due to COVID-19 is uncommon among children," the AAP notes. "However, there is an urgent need to collect more data on longer-term impacts of the pandemic on children, including ways the virus may harm the long-term physical health of infected children, as well as its emotional and mental health effects."