'Rochelle Walensky is a monster for what she did during the Covid pandemic...'

The CDC chief resigned this morning, rather abruptly, it turns out.

Here's Christina Laila, at Gateway Pundit, "BREAKING: Rochelle Walensky Resigns as CDC Director":

During the height of the pandemic, the CDC announced a 60-day moratorium on evictions.

CDC Director Rochelle Walensky acted independently and signed the order – no congressional authorization needed. Walensky is queen and what she says goes...

Kaylee McGhee White for Prager University (VIDEO)

Holy crap, this video!

Kaylee McGhee White is freakin' awesome.

WATCH:

The U.K.'s Government-Run Healthcare Service Is in Crisis

Is Britain's National Institute of Health held up as a model of compassionate, government-provided health care? It's often held up as superior in many ways. 

At the Wall Street Journal, "The NHS is struggling under the effects of budget cuts, Covid delays and an aging population."

As COVID Turns 3, Experts Worry Where the Next Pandemic Will Come From – And If We'll Be Ready

At Instapundit, "WELL, NOBODY TRUSTS THEM NOW, WHICH IS AN ISSUE."

The Boomers in the Twilight Zone

Following-up, "Three-Quarters of Generation Z 'Not Interested In Sports'."

From Andrew Sullivan, "How exactly are they going to die? And how much choice should they have in it?":

I’m not particularly afraid of death. But I’m afraid of dying.

And dying can now take a very, very long time. In the past, with poorer diets, fewer medicines, and many more hazards, your life could be over a few months after being born or moments after giving birth or just as you were contemplating retirement. Now, by your sixties, you may well have close to a quarter of your life ahead of you. In 1860, life expectancy was 39.4 years. By 2060, it’s predicted to be 85.6 years. This is another deep paradigm shift in modernity we have not come close to adapting to.

For some, with their bodies intact and minds sharp, it’s a wonderful thing. But for many, perhaps most others, those final decades can be physically and mentally tough. Increasingly living alone, or in assisted living or nursing homes, the lonely elderly persist in a twilight zone of extended, pain-free — but not exactly better — life.

We don’t like to focus on this quality-of-life question because it calls into question the huge success we have had increasing the quantity of it. But it’s a big deal, it seems to me, altering our entire perspective on our lives and futures. Ricky Gervais has a great bit when he tells how he’s often told to stop smoking, or eat better, or exercise more — because leaving these vices behind will add a decade to his life. And his response is: sure, but the wrong decade! If he could get a decade in his thirties or forties again, he’d take it in an instant. But to live a crepuscular experience in your nineties? Not so much. “Remember, being healthy is basically just dying as slowly as possible,” he quipped. Not entirely wrong.

Anyone who has spent time caring for aging parents knows the drill: the physical and then the mental deterioration; the humiliations of helplessness; the often punitive absorption of drug after drug, treatment after treatment; multiple medicinal protocols of ever-increasing complexity and side effects. Staying in a family home becomes impossible for those who need 24-hour care, and for adult children to handle when they’re already overwhelmed by work and kids. Home-care workers — increasingly low-paid immigrants — can alleviate only so much.

All this is going to get much worse in the next couple of decades as the Boomers age further: “The population aged 45 to 64 years, the peak caregiving age, will increase by 1% between 2010 and 2030 while the population older than 80 years will increase by 79%.” I’ll be among them — on the edge of Gen X and Boomerville.

I mention all this as critical background for debating policies around euthanasia or “assisted dying” (a phrase that feels morbidly destined to become “death-care.”) Oregon pioneered the practice in the US with the Death with Dignity Act in 1997. At the heart of its requirements is a diagnosis of six months to live. Following Oregon’s framework, nine other states and DC now have laws for assisted suicide. Public support for euthanasia has remained strong — 72 percent in the latest Gallup.

But this balance could easily get destabilized in the demographic traffic-jam to come. In 2016, euthanasia came to Canada — but it’s gone much, much further than the US. The Medical Assistance in Dying (or MAID) program is now booming and raising all kinds of red flags: there were “10,000 deaths by euthanasia last year, an increase of about a third from the previous year.” (That’s five times the rate of Oregon, which actually saw a drop in deaths last year.) To help bump yourself off in Canada, under the initial guidelines, there had to be “unbearable physical or mental suffering that cannot be relieved under conditions that patients consider acceptable,” and death had to be “reasonably foreseeable” — not a strict timeline as in Oregon. The law was later amended to allow for assisted suicide even if you are not terminally ill.

More safeguards are now being stripped away:

Gone is the “reasonably foreseeable” death requirement, thus clearing the path of eligibility for disabled individuals who otherwise might have a lifetime to live. Gone, too, is the ten-day waiting requirement and the obligation to provide information on palliative-care options to all applicants. … [O]nly one [independent witness] is necessary now. Unlike in other countries where euthanasia is lawful, Canada does not even require an independent review of the applicant’s request for death to make sure coercion was not involved.

This is less a slippery slope than a full-on, well-polished ice-rink. Several disturbing cases have cropped up — of muddled individuals signing papers they really shouldn’t have with no close relatives consulted; others who simply could not afford the costs of survival with a challenging disease, or housing, and so chose death; people with severe illness being subtly encouraged to die in order to save money:

In one recording obtained by the AP, the hospital’s director of ethics told [patient Roger Foley] that for him to remain in the hospital, it would cost “north of $1,500 a day.” Foley replied that mentioning fees felt like coercion and asked what plan there was for his long-term care. “Roger, this is not my show,” the ethicist responded. “My piece of this was to talk to you, (to see) if you had an interest in assisted dying.”

It’s hard to imagine a greater power-dynamic than that of a hospital doctor and a patient with a degenerative brain disorder. For any doctor to initiate a discussion of costs and euthanasia in this context should, in my view, be a firing offense.

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Then this: in March, a Canadian will be able to request assistance in dying solely for mental health reasons. And the law will also be available to minors under the age of 18. Where to begin? How do we know that the request for suicide isn’t a function of the mental illness? And when the number of assisted suicides jumps by a third in one year, as it just did in Canada, it’s obviously not a hypothetical matter.

Ross Douthat had a moving piece on this — and I largely agree with his insistence on the absolute inviolable dignity of every human being and the unquantifiable moral value of every second of his or her life. I’m a Catholic, after all. At the same time, we have to assess what this moral absolutism means in practice. It can entail a huge amount of personal suffering; it deprives anyone of a right to determine how she or he will die; and it hasn’t been adapted to our unprecedented scientific achievements, which have turned so many medical fates into choices we simply cannot avoid.

Does the person who lives the longest win the race? So much of our medical logic suggests this, but it’s an absurd way to think of life. I’m changed forever by losing some of my closest friends when they were in their twenties and thirties from AIDS a couple decades ago. They died; I didn’t. Wrapping my head around that has taken a while, but it became a burning conviction inside me that their lives were not worth less than mine for being cut so short; that life is less a race than a performance, less about how many years you can rack up, but how much love and passion and friendship a life can express, however brief or interrupted.

I still think this. Which is why I do not want to force terminally sick people to live as their bodies and minds disintegrate so badly that they would really rather die. Dignity goes both ways. My suggestion would be simply not aggressively treating the conditions and illnesses that old age naturally brings, accepting the decline of the body and mind rather than fighting like hell against it, and finding far better ways to simply alleviate pain and distress.

And at some point, go gentle. Treating those at the end of life with psilocybin, or ketamine, or other psychedelics should become routine, as we care for the soul in the days nearer our deaths. (Congress should pass this bipartisan bill to waive Schedule 1 status when it comes to the terminally ill.) We can let people die with dignity, in other words, by inaction as much as action, and by setting sane, humane limits on our medicinal power — with the obvious exception of pain meds.

Even Ross allows that “it is not barbaric for the law to acknowledge hard choices in end-of-life care, about when to withdraw life support or how aggressively to manage agonizing pain.” But that should be less of an aside than a strong proposal. What kind of support for how long? In my view, not much and not for too long. What rights does a dying patient have in refusing treatment? Total. What depths of indignity does she have to endure? Not so much. I’m sure Dish readers have their own views and unique experiences — so let’s air them as frankly as we can in the weeks ahead (dish@andrewsullivan.com). There has to be a line. Maybe we can collectively try to find it

I think of Pope John Paul II’s extremism on the matter of life — even as his body and mind twisted into a contortion of pain and sickness due to Parkinson’s and old age. His example did the opposite of what he intended: he persuaded me of the insanity of clinging to life as if death were the ultimate enemy. There’s little heroism in that — just agony and proof that we humans have once again become victims of our own intelligence, creating worlds we are not equipped or designed to live in, achieving medical successes that, if pursued to their logical conclusion, become grotesque human failures.

Moderation please, especially in our dotage. And mercy.

 

New York City Will Hospitalize Mentally Ill People Involuntarily

This really is the direction we need to go on this, and kudos to Mayor Adams for having the balls to push forward with the program.

At the New York Times, "New York City to Involuntarily Remove Mentally Ill People From Streets: Mayor Eric Adams directed the police and emergency medical workers to hospitalize people they deemed too mentally ill to care for themselves, even if they posed no threat to others."

And from the Letters to the Editor:

To the Editor:

Re “New York Aims to Clear Streets of Mentally Ill” (front page, Nov. 30):

It is many years overdue but, finally, Mayor Eric Adams has courageously acted to bring relief caused by the failed policies that have long harmed mentally ill people in New York City.

By ordering involuntary hospitalization, he is replacing an immoral and scandalous indifference to severe chronic illness with a humane and moral approach.

Claiming autonomy and personal choice as reasons to keep severely mentally ill people who lack competence on our streets makes no sense. Allowing the sick to “rot with their rights on” may appeal to single-minded civil libertarians, but it is deeply disrespectful to the dignity and kindness that mentally ill people deserve.

While the lawsuits will surely fly, the real challenge is to find enough money, beds and providers to ensure that homeless (and incarcerated) men and women with severe mental illness receive care, not a cardboard box.

Arthur Caplan

Ridgefield, Conn.

The writer is a professor of bioethics at New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine.

To the Editor:

Mayor Eric Adams’s plan to involuntarily hospitalize homeless people with no indication that they are a threat (to anything besides his city’s image) is discrimination veiled in compassion.

Addressing the well-being of the unhoused would involve improving the root structural issues leading to poverty and the inability to afford rent. Poor mental health is often a side effect of housing insecurity and being put on the margins of society.

Forcing someone into a hospital system not designed for long-term stays, and that is already strained, does not fix this issue. Slapping a bandage on a bullet wound, or temporarily removing the homeless from the street, does not a compassionate policy make.

I don’t see a mental health crisis as much as I see a desperate need for appropriate and affordable housing.

Loren Barcenas

Chapel Hill, N.C.

The writer is a doctoral student at the University of North Carolina Gillings School of Global Public Health.

To the Editor:

As a disability rights lawyer, I’ve represented many clients with mental illness. I’ve also witnessed the tragedy of three immediate family members suffering from schizophrenia, including both my parents in the 1960s and 1970s.

Choices about involuntary treatment can be excruciating. Psychiatric drugs sometimes have severe side effects. Worse, America has failed to ensure that hospitals provide safe, clean, therapeutic treatment settings. I’ve visited psychiatric hospitals that no one would want a family member to be forced to stay in; my mother died in one when I was a teenager.

That said, we’ve also done a disservice to mentally ill people through revolving-door hospitalization that both frustrates family members and dumps at-risk patients back into the community, untreated, where they often face homelessness or worse.

Mayor Eric Adams’s call for workable plans to connect discharged patients with ongoing care can work only if safe, high-quality care is available. For the sake of America’s most vulnerable people, officials must see that it is.

David Scott

Columbus, Ohio

 

Anthony Fauci Won't Serve in Government Past 2024

See, at Pajamas, "Best. News. Ever. About Dr. Fauci." 

Overdose Deaths in the U.S. Are Rising at Troubling Rate

One can't possibly imagine the loss of a loved one to opioids, among other things.

I mean, the loss of a loved one is tragic in any case, but death from overdose doubly so, as it creates so many "what ifs." It's not like losing a parent in the twilight years of life, for as sad as that is, it's an inevitability. (And both my parents are gone, so I'm speaking from experience.) But if I lost either one of my sons right now, to overdose especially, I think I'd probably fade away. My psychology hasn't been so great this last two years. I've had a lot of anxiety (especially in March 2020 and the overnight shift to emergency remote online instruction) and bouts of depression. The last thing I need is death in the family.

In any case, God bless those facing this crisis. It's unbearable, and worse, it's not one on the top of the radar of public policy. 

At the New York Times,  "A Rising Death Toll":

Drug overdoses now kill more than 100,000 Americans a year — more than vehicle crash and gun deaths combined.

Sean Blake was among those who died. He overdosed at age 27 in Vermont, from a mix of alcohol and fentanyl, a synthetic opioid. He had struggled to find effective treatment for his addiction and other potential mental health problems, repeatedly relapsing.

“I do love being sober,” Blake wrote in 2014, three years before his death. “It’s life that gets in the way.”

Blake’s struggles reflect the combination of problems that have allowed the overdose crisis to fester. First, the supply of opioids surged. Second, Americans have insufficient access to treatment and other programs that can ease the worst damage of drugs.

Experts have a concise, if crude, way to summarize this: If it’s easier to get high than to get treatment, people who are addicted will get high. The U.S. has effectively made it easy to get high and hard to get help.

No other advanced nation is dealing with a comparable drug crisis. And over the past two years, it has worsened: Annual overdose deaths spiked 50 percent as fentanyl spread in illegal markets, more people turned to drugs during the pandemic, and treatment facilities and other services shut down.

The path to crisis

In the 1990s, drug companies promoted opioid painkillers as a solution to a problem that remains today: a need for better pain treatment. Purdue Pharma led the charge with OxyContin, claiming it was more effective and less addictive than it was.

Doctors bought into the hype, and they started to more loosely prescribe opioids. Some even operated “pill mills,” trading prescriptions for cash.

A growing number of people started to misuse the drugs, crushing or dissolving the pills to inhale or inject them. Many shared, stole and sold opioids more widely.

Policymakers and drug companies were slow to react. It wasn’t until 2010 that Purdue introduced a new formulation that made its pills harder to misuse. The C.D.C. didn’t publish guidelines calling for tighter prescribing practices until two decades after OxyContin hit the market.

In the meantime, the crisis deepened: Opioid users moved on to more potent drugs, namely heroin. Some were seeking a stronger high, while others were cut off from painkillers and looking for a replacement.

Traffickers met that demand by flooding the U.S. with heroin. Then, in the 2010s, they started to transition to fentanyl, mixing it into heroin and other drugs or selling it on its own.

Drug cartels can more discreetly produce fentanyl in a lab than heroin derived from large, open poppy fields. Fentanyl is also more potent than heroin, so traffickers can smuggle less to sell the same high.

Because of its potency, fentanyl is also more likely to cause an overdose. Since it began to proliferate in the U.S., yearly overdose deaths have more than doubled.

No one has a good answer for how to halt the spread of fentanyl. Synthetic drugs in general remain a major, unsolved question not just in the current opioid epidemic but in dealing with future drug crises as well, Keith Humphreys, a Stanford University drug policy expert, told me.

Other drug crises are looming. In recent years, cocaine and meth deaths have also increased. Humphreys said that historically, stimulant epidemics follow opioid crises.

Neglecting solutions

A robust treatment system could have mitigated the damage from increasing supplies of painkillers, heroin and fentanyl. But the U.S. has never had such a system.

Treatment remains inaccessible for many...

Still more.

 

Now Leftists Want Masks Off Our Children

The political winds have changes, showing --- once again --- just how craven is the progressive left.

See Michelle Goldberg, at the New York Times, "Let Kids Take Their Masks Off After the Omicron Surge":

Perfect example of medical professionals NOW admitting their "professional" advice since the beginning of the lockdown was bull. 💉😷💉 #BacktoSchool https://t.co/ceCPy4IiVc

— Donald Douglas 📘 (@AmPowerBlog) January 30, 2022

Elissa Perkins, the director of infectious disease management in the emergency department of the Boston Medical Center, told me she spent most of 2020 “imploring everybody I could in every forum that I could to mask.” In the beginning, she said, this was to flatten the curve, and later to protect the vulnerable. But masking, she said, “was intended to be a short-term intervention,” and she believes we haven’t talked enough about the drawbacks of mandating it for kids long-term.

“If we accept that we don’t want masks to be required in our schools forever, we have to decide when is the right time to remove them,” she said. “And that’s a conversation that we’re not really having.”

At least, people in deep blue areas weren’t having it until recently. But as the Omicron wave begins to ebb, that conversation — sometimes tentatively and sometimes acrimoniously — has begun. This week Perkins co-wrote a Washington Post essay calling for schools to make masking optional. The Atlantic published an article titled, “The Case Against Masks at School.”

“Coming off the Omicron surge, I think there’s going to be a tipping point with more and more people questioning does this need to continue in schools,” said Erin Bromage, an associate professor of biology at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth. Bromage worked with the governor of Rhode Island to reopen schools there, and later helped schools in southern Massachusetts reopen. He believes in the importance of Covid mitigations, but his views on school masking have evolved in recent months. There comes a point, he said, “at which the reduction in risk that comes from the mask is balanced or begins to be outweighed by the detrimental side of things that come with masking.”

The debate about masks in schools can quickly turn vicious because it pits legitimate interests against one another. Many people who are immunocompromised, or live with those who are, understandably fear that getting rid of mandates will make them more vulnerable. But keeping kids in masks month after month also inflicts harm, even if it’s not always easy to measure.

“I think it would be naïve to not acknowledge that there are downsides of masks,” said Perkins. “I know some of that data is harder to come by because those outcomes are not as discrete as Covid or not-Covid. But from speaking with pediatricians, from speaking with learning specialists, and also from speaking with parents of younger children especially, there are significant issues related to language acquisition, pronunciation, things like that. And there are very clear social and emotional side effects in the older kids.”

That’s why I believe that mandatory school masking should end when coronavirus rates return to pre-Omicron levels. I fully accept that, in future surges, masks might have to go back on, but that’s all the more reason to get them off as soon as possible, to give students some reprieve.

Otherwise, I fear that, at least in very liberal areas, a combination of extreme risk aversion and inertia means that school masking will persist indefinitely. The chief executive of the Prince George’s County public schools in Maryland recently downplayed the idea of a future without masks, saying: “The only off-ramp I want is the one where Covid no longer exists. I don’t think that that off-ramp will exist.” I hope this attitude isn’t widespread, but if it is, it will be incumbent for progressive parents desperate for an off-ramp to push back.

There’s some question about how well masks in school really work; many studies are confounded, since communities with school mask mandates tend to adopt other Covid mitigation measures as well. Much of The Atlantic’s “The Case Against Masks at School” is devoted to reviewing studies either conducted or cited by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and it concludes that the “overall takeaway from these studies — that schools with mask mandates have lower Covid-19 transmission rates than schools without mask mandates — is not justified by the data that have been gathered.”

The fact that experts can poke holes in some studies of masking does not mean that masks don’t make a difference...

Keep reading. 

Bari Weiss on 'Real Time with Bill Maher': 'I'm Done!' (VIDEO)

This is viral material. 

I love Bari, heh.

From Friday night's show:

Comply or Die

On Twitter, "A message from Dear Leader Obiden":

Omicron Leaves U.S. Parents, Teachers, and Students on Edge

Maybe this variant is peaking. We'll see. 

At LAT, "Anxious. Helpless. Upset. Omicron surge leaves U.S. parents, teachers and students on edge":

Tierra Pearson suspected the winter months would mean a sharp surge in coronavirus cases. So the Chicago mother made sure she and her two sons — seventh- and 10th-graders — were fully vaccinated.

“We were going to be prepared,” she recalled.

But as she kept the TV news on around the clock over much of the last two weeks, watching in dismay as leaders of the Chicago Teachers Union and Mayor Lori Lightfoot battled over safety precautions and schools reopening, Pearson felt far from prepared. She felt helpless.

“We as parents were totally left out of the conversation,” she said. “We had no voice about our schools, and that was truly a shame.”

As the Omicron variant continues to propel a massive surge in infections that has hit many educators and school staff, parents across the nation are faced with painful deja vu: toggling between virtual and in-person schooling and trying to keep up with constantly evolving district policies.

This week the Biden administration announced that it is planning to make 10 million COVID-19 test kits available each month for schools as part of its push to keep classrooms open during this wave of infections — a critical step considering that vaccination rates are lower among children.

Registered nurse Rafael Sanchez, left, evaluates COVID-19 patient.

Overall, 63% of Americans are fully vaccinated, but among children ages 12 to 17 the rate sits at 54% and among those 5 to 11, the rate drops to 17%. (In Vermont, 48% of that age group are vaccinated; in California, nearly 19%; and in Mississippi, 5%.)

But disruptions have occurred and at regular intervals.

On average, about 4% of schools across the country — 4,179 of 98,000 schools — dealt with COVID-19 disruptions such as closures this week, according to Burbio, a K-12 school opening tracker. That’s down slightly from 5,376 schools last week and a fraction of the peak that occurred around Labor Day 2020 when more than 60% of schools were closed, said Dennis Roche, Burbio’s co-founder.

Most of the closures were in the Northeast and Midwest, but some schools were starting to close in the West and South, Roche said. In Minneapolis, schools will go virtual for two weeks starting Friday because of a surge in Omicron cases among teachers. In Louisville, Ky., Jefferson County Public Schools shifted to remote learning because of COVID staffing shortages, while in the Portland, Ore., metro area, school districts moved to remote learning due to surges in cases and teachers being out sick.

Across the U.S., students are threatening boycotts and walkouts. The Oakland Unified School District faces such a strike unless it addresses a list of pandemic health and safety concerns. Students want the district to return to remote learning unless it provides KN95 masks for all kids and are calling for increased testing, among other demands. On Jan. 7, 12 district schools were forced to close after teachers staged a “sickout,” citing COVID worries. About 500 teachers were reported absent. And in New York, hundreds of students in recent days boycotted classes and staged walkouts over concerns about testing and called for remote learning to be implemented.

“We’re really in a pressure cooker situation right now, because American families are holding up the economy, we’re holding up the healthcare system and then we’re also expected to hold up the public education system,” said Keri Rodrigues, president of the National Parents Union, a network of grass-roots parent groups. “A lot of families across this country are absolutely at their breaking point.”

For many parents who live paycheck to paycheck, taking a few days off when schools close can mean the difference between having groceries or not and making rent or not, Rodrigues said. Beyond the financial loss, many parents worried that their kids’ mental health and grades would deteriorate when schools switch to remote learning.

“When you close down schools over an abundance of caution, understand what you are asking of American families who are already at the brink,” she said.

This week the Clark County School District, which spans Las Vegas and is the nation’s fifth largest school system with more than 320,000 students, announced it was canceling classes for two days due to extreme staffing shortages.

Jessica Atlas, a 46-year-old single mother, was already frustrated with the school district for not planning activities for her son, Ashton, 9, while he quarantined this week after he caught the flu and she tested positive for the coronavirus.

“I feel like the bottom’s falling out,” Atlas said, noting that Ashton had not been sent home with any additional

schoolwork. “There should be a plan in place if you send kids home. But there’s no organization, no real leadership and no real plan to catch these babies failing all over the place.”

The district said there would be no remote learning on the canceled school days.

 

California Schools Strain Under Omicron Surge

This is actually astonishing.

At LAT, "California schools under intense strain, fighting to stay open during Omicron surge":

In Los Angeles, schools saw a massive 130,000-student drop in daily attendance when students returned from winter break this week, the latest pandemic hit to education.

In San Diego, severe staffing shortages led school leaders to warn families of the possibility of “COVID Impact Days” similar to heat or snow days. And in Culver City, district leaders announced that they would close all schools next week to give students and staff time to “recoup and recover.”

Educators across California are in triage mode working to keep campuses open and the state’s 6 million children in class as Omicron-fueled coronavirus cases surge. Save for some notable exceptions, they are managing to do so. But staff and students are strained in new and stressful ways as yet another intense pandemic chapter unfolds at schools.

Amid outbreaks and rocketing infections, districts have closed classrooms; some teachers are trying to figure out how to adjust their lesson plans with fewer than a third of students at their desks; and administrators and other district employees are scrambling to fill in for absent staff. Only two weeks into the spring semester, many are exhausted.

“I’m frustrated for my staff, I see the wear and tear on them, " said Craig Spratt, principal of Cerritos Elementary School in Cerritos. “They’re putting on the bravest of faces. They’re providing the best routine they can for their kids and I’m just doing whatever I can to relieve them of the extra burdens so they can focus on their kids. It’s a very stressful time right now.”

A few districts have delayed the start of the spring semester or closed schools amid the surge, including Montebello Unified and the small Mammoth Unified School District, where schools were ordered closed for three weeks.

The spike in school cases has been swift and dramatic. In Los Angeles County prior to Omicron, the rate of positive cases among students and staff was “extraordinarily low” at about 0.2%, said county Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer in a news briefing this week. Last week, it soared to nearly 15% — or more than 80,000 positive tests.

Health officials are investigating about two dozen school outbreaks — which were largely linked to school sports during the winter break. And Ferrer warned the surge would probably lead to more.

In L.A. Unified, average attendance through Thursday was about 67%, district officials said. All schools remained open for in-person learning and administrators left their offices to help to cover for teacher absences when substitutes could not be found.

San Pedro High School Principal Steve Gebhart said he felt the emptiness of his campus as he walked this week through the school’s quad and near the flagpole during lunch.

About 800 students out of a population of 2,650 were absent early in the week, and about 500 students were absent on Friday, he said.

Students have been hesitant to return amid overwhelming news of the coronavirus surge but started to come back as they saw that school “was safe and all the measures in place were working,” Gebhart said. The school also had several teachers out each day but managed to cover them with certificated staff without having to combine classes, he said. Gebhart substituted in a health class Wednesday.

In San Diego, officials sent a message to families letting them know that because of the severe challenges facing schools, children would probably experience disruption during the next few weeks — whether it be a substitute, classwork in a study hall-type environment or “instructional time replaced by self-paced activities.”

“These are temporary measures required by the pandemic, and employing these strategies will allow San Diego Unified to keep classrooms open,” officials said.

As a last resort, district officials said they would work with local authorities to declare a “COVID Impact Day,” closing campuses for a day. In Burbank, where students returned to campus on Jan. 3, attendance fell to about 75% and at least eight classrooms at five different elementary schools have had to close, said Supt. Matt Hill. The district has also leaned on office staff to fill in because of staffing shortfalls.

Districts need more flexibility and support from the state, Hill said. He wants to see the state start distributing coronavirus tests directly to families, rather than placing an additional burden on schools to hand them out. He also wants the state to provide testing clinics for districts so that hundreds of districts aren’t tasked with setting up their own.

In Culver City, district officials announced Friday that because of the spike in coronavirus cases, it would close all schools next week. The K-12 public school system, the first in the nation to issue a coronavirus student vaccination mandate, had recorded 587 student cases since Aug. 2020. Of those, 463 were reported in the last two weeks. The district has 7,100 students and 900 employees.

“Things accelerated too quickly,” Supt. Quoc Tran said. By taking a few days off, “everyone will get the chance to be distant from one another, recoup and recover and come back Monday.”

Students will be sent home with a coronavirus testing kit and they will need to show a negative test to return Jan. 24.

The surge has also led to labor strife, with teachers in San Francisco, Oakland and West Contra Costa staging actions to demand additional safety measures.

In Oakland, students also began circulating a petition echoing teachers’ safety demands. To date, it has been signed by more than 1,200 students. Ayleen Serrano, a petition organizer and a sophomore at MetWest High School, said she has felt the strain of the surge. All her classes are only half full, she said. One has only 7 students instead of 20.

“Even when there’s two or three kids missing it makes a big dent,” she said. “We also can’t learn anything because a lot of the kids, they’ll fall behind.”

Across the state, staffing shortages have led teachers and school officials to take extraordinary measures...

 

 

California Schools Poised for Return to Emergency Remote Online Instruction

The word is at some schools says students who aren't sick have skipped the first two weeks of classes, and then there are all the real cases the Omicron. A *shit show* is how one teacher described things.

It's a new world out there, and not a better one.

At Politico, "California official: Schools can return to remote learning due to staff shortages."

'You personally attack me': Anthony Fauci Hits Back at Senator Rand Paul During Senate Health Hearing (VIDEO)

From yesterday, during testimony at the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions.

At NYT, "Fauci Says Senator Rand Paul Is Fueling Threats Against Him."

Folks were slamming Senator Paul on Twitter yesterday. Mean-spirited, though MAGA trolls where cheering. 

WATCH:

How Many People Have Died from COVID Versus with COVID?

This was the big debate yesterday, over Rochelle Walinsky's comments. 

At WSJ, "Now She Tells Us":

Amid a mounting pile of unfulfilled Biden promises on Covid, from his pledge to shut down the virus to his assurance of abundant testing, the president’s favorite experts are suddenly sharing relevant facts that were too inconvenient to emphasize during his predecessor’s administration. Last week this column noted that two years, $4 trillion of federal debt and millions of isolated children too late, White House Covid czar Dr. Anthony Fauci has discovered the massive costs of pandemic restrictions. Now we have Dr. Rochelle Walensky, head of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, implicitly making the case for a strategy she once disparaged.

On Friday, ABC’s “Good Morning America” program touted research showing that Covid vaccines are highly effective in preventing severe illness and then asked the CDC director: “Given that, is it time to start rethinking how we’re living with this virus, that it’s probably here to stay?” Dr. Walensky responded: 

The overwhelming number of deaths, over 75%, occurred in people who had at least 4 comorbidities. So really these are people who were unwell to begin with and yes, really encouraging news in the context of Omicron.

Dr. Walensky seems to have been trying to make the point that the vast majority of people do not face as great a risk as one would think from listening to Covid-era apocalyptic forecasts from people like her.

Sure, it may be hard to forget her unscientific March 2021 declaration at a White House briefing:

I’m going to reflect on the recurring feeling I have of impending doom.

Then there was her decision that the threat could somehow be addressed by issuing an unconstitutional ban on evictions. But if Dr. Walensky has since gotten a hold of herself and is now trying to enhance understanding of the threats people face, that would be progress.

Her CDC website notes that close to 95% of death certificates listing Covid as a cause also mention other causes along with Covid and states:

For deaths with conditions or causes in addition to COVID-19, on average, there were 4.0 additional conditions or causes per death.

Unfortunately, in her Friday ABC interview, Dr. Walensky’s phrasing of the “encouraging news” about modest risk for many Americans sparked an online backlash as some interpreted the remarks as callous toward those at high risk. Kamau Bell of HBO and CNN tweeted, “I counted up my comorbidities. Now I can let my family know that if I die from COVID it is ‘encouraging.’ ”

On Sunday Dr. Walensky tweeted:

We must protect people with comorbidities from severe #COVID19. I went into medicine – HIV specifically – and public health to protect our most at-risk. CDC is taking steps to protect those at highest risk, incl. those w/ chronic health conditions, disabilities & older adults.

Fair enough, but this recognition that some face great risk from Covid while others face much lower risk has been obvious from the start. In response, a group of accomplished and wise scientists crafted the Great Barrington Declaration in 2020 to promote a ”focused protection” strategy—taking great care to shield those at high risk while allowing the vast majority who are at low risk to continue working, learning and doing all the things that sustain life. This sensible prioritization sounds very much like what Dr. Walensky is suggesting in her Sunday tweet...

Here's Lisa Boothe:

Why can’t the CDC answer how many people have died from COVID versus with COVID? It’s criminal they won’t. My thoughts below 👇 pic.twitter.com/0WYb58FmNn

— Lisa Boothe (@LisaMarieBoothe) January 10, 2022

And for the full context, see Allahpundit, at Hot Air, "Here's what the CDC chief actually told ABC about COVID deaths and comorbidities."

There's No Evidence That Vaccines Are Reducing Infections from Omicron

Things are completely breaking up for the Democrats. Quite simply, people are fed up.

At WSJ, "Omicron Makes Biden’s Vaccine Mandates Obsolete":

Federal courts considering the Biden administration’s vaccination mandates—including the Supreme Court at Friday’s oral argument—have focused on administrative-law issues. The decrees raise constitutional issues as well. But there’s a simpler reason the justices should stay these mandates: the rise of the Omicron variant.

It would be irrational, legally indefensible and contrary to the public interest for government to mandate vaccines absent any evidence that the vaccines are effective in stopping the spread of the pathogen they target. Yet that’s exactly what’s happening here.

Both mandates—from the Health and Human Services Department for healthcare workers and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration for large employers in many other industries—were issued Nov. 5. At that time, the Delta variant represented almost all U.S. Covid-19 cases, and both agencies appropriately considered Delta at length and in detail, finding that the vaccines remained effective against it.

Those findings are now obsolete. As of Jan. 1, Omicron represented more than 95% of U.S. Covid cases, according to estimates from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Because some of Omicron’s 50 mutations are known to evade antibody protection, because more than 30 of those mutations are to the spike protein used as an immunogen by the existing vaccines, and because there have been mass Omicron outbreaks in heavily vaccinated populations, scientists are highly uncertain the existing vaccines can stop it from spreading. As the CDC put it on Dec. 20, “we don’t yet know . . . how well available vaccines and medications work against it.”

The Supreme Court held in Jacobson v. Massachusetts (1905) that the right to refuse medical treatment could be overcome when society needs to curb the spread of a contagious epidemic. At Friday’s oral argument, all the justices acknowledged that the federal mandates rest on this rationale. But mandating a vaccine to stop the spread of a disease requires evidence that the vaccines will prevent infection or transmission (rather than efficacy against severe outcomes like hospitalization or death). As the World Health Organization puts it, “if mandatory vaccination is considered necessary to interrupt transmission chains and prevent harm to others, there should be sufficient evidence that the vaccine is efficacious in preventing serious infection and/or transmission.” For Omicron, there is as yet no such evidence.

The little data we have suggest the opposite. One preprint study found that after 30 days the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines no longer had any statistically significant positive effect against Omicron infection, and after 90 days, their effect went negative—i.e., vaccinated people were more susceptible to Omicron infection. Confirming this negative efficacy finding, data from Denmark and the Canadian province of Ontario indicate that vaccinated people have higher rates of Omicron infection than unvaccinated people.

Meantime, it has long been known that vaccinated people with breakthrough infections are highly contagious, and preliminary data from all over the world indicate that this is true of Omicron as well. As CDC Director Rochelle Walensky put it last summer, the viral load in the noses and throats of vaccinated people infected with Delta is “indistinguishable” from that of unvaccinated people, and “what [the vaccines] can’t do anymore is prevent transmission.”

There is some early evidence that boosters may reduce Omicron infections, but the effect appears to wane quickly, and we don’t know if repeated boosters would be an effective response to the surge of Omicron. That depends among other things on the severity of disease Omicron causes, another great unknown. According to the CDC, the overwhelming majority of symptomatic U.S. Omicron cases have been mild. The best policy might be to let Omicron run its course while protecting the most vulnerable, naturally immunizing the vast majority against Covid through infection by a relatively benign strain. As Sir Andrew Pollard, head of the U.K.’s Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation, said in a recent interview, “We can’t vaccinate the planet every four or six months. It’s not sustainable or affordable.”

In any event, the vaccine mandates before the court don’t require boosters. They define “fully vaccinated” as two doses of Moderna or Pfizer-BioNTech or one dose of Johnson & Johnson. Even if boosters would help, the mandates would leave tens or hundreds of thousands of unboosted employees on the job, who have zero or negative protection against Omicron infection, and who would be highly contagious if they become infected. In other words, there is no scientific basis for believing these mandates will curb the spread of the disease.

Still more.

The Week America Called in Sick

Things are bad. Awfully bad out there. 

And the administration appears helpless to do anything about it. 

People are saying it's "2020-2." It may even be worse than that. We're not going to lock down again, so everyone's in the atomic freak-out mode. It's not pretty. 

At the Wall Street Journal, "Omicron and the Week America Is Calling In Sick":

Hundreds of first responders in Los Angeles are out sick or quarantined due to Covid-19. A hotel staffing company is flying housekeepers to Florida and Texas to fill in for absent staff. A medical laboratory in Denver doesn’t have enough staff to send people to nursing homes to take blood samples.

The first full week of 2022 was supposed to signal a return to work after the winter holidays. Instead, America called in sick. Employers have been hit by a global wave of Covid-19 illnesses and people missing work because they or their family or co-workers have been exposed to the fast-spreading Omicron variant. School closings and child-care issues are also keeping some workers at home.

“We have gotten to the point this week where there are a number of shifts that nobody can fill,” said Lena DeGloma, owner of Red Moon Wellness spa in the Brooklyn borough of New York City. Six of 25 employees were out Thursday, with two having just come back. Ms. DeGloma returned to work Thursday after quarantining for 10 days because she tested positive for Covid-19.

The recent surge in employee absences is the latest strain on public and private sectors already worn down by the pandemic, supply chain snarls, labor shortages and rising prices. Many employees are reporting mild symptoms as a result of Covid-19, employers say, but must still miss multiple days of work, leaving employers to grapple daily with the question of who will be in and who can’t make it.

An inability to get Covid-19 tests is also a challenge for some people figuring out whether they can work outside the home, travel and congregate with others.

The fresh disruption to the global labor market at the start of the third pandemic year is both familiar and foreign. In the U.S., the seven-day average of daily cases reported surpassed 500,000 for the first time since the 2020 pandemic declaration. Omicron infections are resulting in fewer hospitalizations than earlier variants but the volume of people testing positive or exposed is taking its toll on workplaces—which are already stretched by the tight U.S. labor market.

More than five million Americans could be stuck at home isolating over the coming days, according to Andrew Hunter, senior U.S. economist at Capital Economics. While more people have worked from home since the start of the pandemic, many jobs can’t be done remotely, and though the economic effects of the latest Covid-19 surge could be temporary, he wrote in a report Wednesday it could “deal a significant hit to the economy over the next month or two.”

U.S. health officials have shortened quarantine times for individuals who test positive and have no symptoms. And some employees might be able to work from home while sick. Still, staffing shortages disrupted some essential services this week, from airline flights to in-person learning. New York City’s public transit system operated some bus and subway routes at reduced frequency. A hospital in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., temporarily stopped taking new labor and delivery patients.

Los Angeles officials said Thursday they had adequate staffing for emergency services despite having more than 400 police officers and roughly 300 firefighters and emergency medical personnel who were sick or in quarantine.

“What is so difficult about this illness is you don’t know if you’ve got it until you take a test—and that takes time,” said Terry Bell, co-owner of Salon ILO in Washington, D.C.

Revenue fell by about 50% at Mr. Bell’s business during the pandemic, but no one got sick until mid-December, when the salon had to close for two weeks and cancel about 400 appointments. Fifteen of 18 staff members were diagnosed with Covid-19 following the annual holiday party. All 18 had been vaccinated, and only one hadn’t received a booster shot, said Mr. Bell, who tested negative.

The salon, in business for 41 years, reopened a few days before the New Year’s holiday. Then, this Tuesday, one hairdresser, who had been ill in December, called in to report a sore throat, forcing the salon to cancel another 45 or so appointments.

The hairdresser ended up testing negative, he said, and returned to work Thursday.

Greg Casten, a partner in four family-owned Washington restaurants, now begins his mornings with a health update from his management team. “Every day, there is at least one surprise,” said Mr. Casten, who estimates that, since mid-December, about 35% of his employees have called out because of Covid-19 or a Covid-19 exposure.

At one of Mr. Casten’s restaurants, Nick’s Riverside Grill, two of six employees are out. At Tony and Joe’s Seafood Place, managers waited tables and cleaned dishes this week because so many other staffers were ill or in quarantine.

Mr. Casten said he was relieved to close his restaurants on Monday in response to a winter snowstorm, a step he wouldn’t normally take. “I am strung out and tired,” he said. “We were very happy not to open because of the weather.”

At Rocky Mountain Labs, an independent clinical laboratory in Denver that began offering Covid-19 tests early in the pandemic, Omicron has brought a surge in demand for the tests at the same time that it has taken staff out of commission. Three of the lab’s nine employees were out sick with the virus this week, said co-owner Amy Hicks, and another just gave notice, citing burnout.

To fill all the requests for Covid-19 tests, Ms. Hicks and her husband, a physician and co-owner, have had to pull staff from their second location, a lab that does traditional pathology work. And they have had to reduce some services, such as sending phlebotomists to nursing homes to draw blood and bring the samples back for testing. “We’re so short-staffed we have to tell clients we can’t come out,” she said.

Dan Kesic, president of Chicago-based Hospitality Services Group, contracts with clients including hotels and resorts to provide housekeepers, servers and cooks. Mr. Kesic said at least 30% of the company’s more than 1,000 hourly workers are dealing with Covid-19 this week, either from infection or exposure.

“This week, it’s just like there’s no fix,” he said. ”As you fix something, something else breaks. There’s these expectations from people that you can’t meet.”

To fill the gap, Mr. Kesic said his company is subcontracting work in markets where clients are located, including Florida, Texas and Arizona, as well as paying bonuses to people who can even work up to two weeks on some jobs.

He said the company in recent weeks also paid to fly staff across the country, similar to traveling nurses, to fill hotel housekeeping or other roles. But Covid-19 is also upending those plans, with the recent spate of flight cancellations.

The Omicron variant has battered many businesses that until recently had been able to keep Covid-19 at bay through masking, vaccinations and other safeguards...

 

College, University Lockdowns Can't be Justified by the Science

Dr. Marty Makary, at Bari Weiss's Substack, "Universities' Covid Policies Defy Science and Reason":

Universities are supposed to be bastions of critical thinking, reason and logic. But the Covid policies they have adopted—policies that have derailed two years of students’ education and threaten to upend the upcoming spring semester—have exposed them as nonsensical, anti-scientific and often downright cruel.

Some of America’s most prestigious universities are leading the charge.

At Georgetown University, fully vaccinated students are randomly tested for Covid every week. Using a PCR test, which can detect tiny amounts of dead virus, asymptomatic students who test positive are ordered to a room in a designated building where they spend 10 days in confinement. Food is dropped off once a day at the door.

I spoke to several students who were holed up. One of them told me she would sometimes call a friend to come and wave at her through the window, just to see a human face. Another told me that the experience in quarantine “totally changed” her feelings about the school. “Everyone’s just fed up at this point,” she said. “People walk around the library and yell at you if you drink a sip of water. And it was during finals.” She told me she is thinking about “transferring to an SEC school just to have an in-person experience.”

Given the fact that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has recently changed the official quarantine period from 10 days to five, I reached out to Georgetown’s Chief Public Health Officer, Dr. Ranit Mishori. She told me that Georgetown is still using a 10-day quarantine.

Students are the lowest risk population on planet Earth. Over the last six months, the risk of a person in the broader age group (15-24) dying of Covid or dying with Covid (the CDC does not clearly distinguish), was 0.001%. All or nearly all of those deaths were in a very specific subgroup: unvaccinated people with a medical comorbidity. But despite Georgetown’s strict vaccination, masking, testing, and quarantine requirements, the university announced late last month that “all University events, including meetings with visitors, will need to be held virtually or outdoors,” among many other restrictions.

At Princeton University, fully vaccinated students are not allowed to leave the county unless they are on a sports team. They’re also testing all students twice a week, usurping the scarce testing supply from vulnerable communities so that low-risk, young people can use them.

At Cornell, masks are still the rule—and even recommended outdoors. “Masks must be worn indoors at all times, unless in a private, non-shared space (e.g., dorm room or office); we strongly recommend masking outdoors when physical distancing is not possible,” the school announced in mid-December.

At Amherst, students must double mask if they don’t use a KN95. In nearby Boston, at Emerson College, students are tested twice a week and have stay-in-room orders. The college instructs students to “only leave their residence halls or place of residence for testing, meals, medical appointments, necessary employment, or to get mail.” Seriously.

At these institutions of higher learning and thousands more, science is supposedly held in the highest esteem. So where is the scientific support for masking outdoors? Where is the scientific support for constantly testing fully vaccinated young people? Where is the support for the confinement of asymptomatic, young people who test positive for a virus to which they are already immune on a campus of other immune people? The data simply do not justify any of it...

 

Danielle Allen, Democracy in the Time of Coronavirus

At Amazon, Danielle Allen, Democracy in the Time of Coronavirus.