It’s 85% effective at something something but only 66% effective at blah blah blah
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We’ve been given an option to continue remote, which we are doing.
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As of Thursday morning, Estonia’s 14-day average is 850.81 per 100,000 people. The World Health Organization’s monitor show’s the Czech Republic has the highest rate at 1,211.
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My city has decided that not enough people were coming down with Covid, so as of today they are opening up restaurants and gyms. Well, that should take care of that problem.
I envy you your impending shutdown.
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i meant to comment about this earlier but life distracted me, as often happens.
one thing that is important to realize is that “jim crow” schools built pre1966-1970 may be thickest in the south but exist all over the country have been converted over the years into part of the unified, desegregated school systems. in the where town i grew up, in the towns i’ve taught in, and in my hometown there are “separate but equal” school buildings now in use for all students in the district. after all, with budgets in so many place being so tight why would a district not use a building that was already there instead of starting new?
the sad thing is that these late conversions show off how unequal “separate but equal” really was and while many of the white facilities built at the same time had, for the time, modern hvac systems built in the black schools had just a few windows and a gas heater at one end of the room. retrofitting many of these buildings with “adequate ventilation” is going to be both challenging and expensive. as i said above, my district did the high school building because it is the most heavily populated building but it was a white building when it was built and so had a pretty solid hvac system for which the upgrade was if not cheap then relatively simple to accomplish. two of the four elementary schools in town are similarly well-equipped, one originally a white-only building while the other is a new (5 years old) building, but two of them were in fact black schools which will cost as much as it did for the high school to retrofit each of them, with each school holding only about a fourth as many students as the high school did.
other districts in my area with fewer resources are hampered by financial constraints far worse than my district. the legacy of jim crow lives on to keep biting us in the ass over and over.
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Virginia bears the scars of the “Massive Resistance” movement of the 60’s, with public schools from that era hugely underfunded and poorly constructed due to white flight from public schools to private religious schools to avoid desegregation. Some of those (functionally if not officially) Black schools have been converted to other uses, ironically often including being turned into private religious schools after being sold by the cities and towns that built them, but way too many remain in use as public school buildings despite antiquated HVAC, plumbing and other systems. In a number of cases locally, it was much cheaper to sell or tear them down and start over than it was to upgrade to modern standards.
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Long before covid, but I live in AZ, work in CA, so unaffected (AZ income tax is nominally smaller than CA, but not meaningfully to me).
If you think this sounds like a disaster in the making for millions, well, you’ve got plenty of company. And states being what they are, there are only two real avenues available for changing the situation: Congress or the courts.
I think I like the idea of only paying taxes where you live. I don’t think a significant number of people are going to choose to live somewhere based on state income tax levels, and so instead the competition is going to be based on providing a nice place to live instead of cutting taxes on businesses to get them to locate in your state.
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This has been an issue for cities for decades, trying to get some tax revenue to support their infrastructure when the wealthiest users of that infrastructure live in the suburbs.
Possibly this belongs in its own thread, since it is only peripherally rona-related.
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Play stupid games…
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Are we ready to defund them, yet?
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https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/covid-vaccinations-spawn-battle-over-when-to-end-distancing
To Dr. Christina Ramirez, a professor of biostatistics at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, the only real question at play should be one of ending severe disease and death.
“Most people care if they’re going to be put in the hospital or if they or their loved ones get really sick and die,” Ramirez argued. “The whole purpose of the vaccine is to prevent hospitalizations.”
But other public health experts argue that the goal for vaccinations should be far broader: curbing transmission to a point where the virus is not just inert from a health standpoint, but unlikely to continue circulating.
“What we need to target is a point where transmission is such that it’s unlikely for people to come into contact with COVID-19, even if they’re not vaccinated,” Dr. Cindy Prins, an infectious disease epidemiologist at the University of Florida, told TPM.
The two goals may seem similar, but end up with drastically different conclusions: one projects a level of normalcy this summer, while the more expansive goal of curbing transmission across the country could push distancing recommendations into 2022.
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The folks who are for ending distancing and masking are not getting the whole picture. COVID-19 has severe long-term side-effects, and it has been so far very difficult to predict who will experience them. The side-effects hit the physiological Big Three - the brain, heart, and lungs - pretty hard. We’re going to be seeing cognitive problems, respiratory inflammation, and excessive clotting for decades even in people who were asymptomatic. This is going to be one of the biggest public health challenges for the next half century.
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However bad that winds up being (again, very preliminary results on the vaccines suggest they do a pretty good job of preventing actual infection as well as guarding against obvious symptoms), I think the biggest concern must remain the danger of vaccine-resistant mutation, and mutation in general, as the other thing that can of course change is the lethality. There really needs to be a strong voice explaining that we are potentially being asked to choose between a slow reduction in mitigation measures or going through this hell every other year forever.
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it’s definitely part of the corporate “perks list” for jobs in texas that there are no state taxes. and there are also definitely people who live in washington state and work in oregon to avoid the oregon state taxes.
it’s probably not the reason people choose to live somewhere, but it is a reason for some
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Anyone who lives in the Vancouver, WA area and works in the Portland, OR area because of taxes is being punished for that stupidity with one of the worst commutes on the planet. You couldn’t pay me enough to try to cross either of those bridges in rush hour. There are times when it’s faster to go through Astoria, 85 miles away at the mouth of the Columbia, than it is to just cross the river on I-5 or I-205.
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And all the people said, “AMEN”
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