As school districts and other institutions scramble to improve ventilation systems, Sarah Chang says we can learn something from a century and more ago.
• That said, some school districts just plowed straight ahead, like Southwest Sicking Local School District. Doors and windows were opened more, but there were no fancy upgrades to AC units. Otherwise, mask mandates were enforced and hallways were made one-way at Thomas Watkins High, and that was it. And, no, it's not in ruraldom. It's in suburban Columbus, Ohio. The state leadership of Gov. Mike DeWine, UNarguably the most enlightened Republican governor in the nation on this issue, has surely helped.
• Hilda Bastian, a coronavirus data genius right up with Zeynep Tufecki, weighs in on the problems with the AstraZenica vaccine (she expects it to get worse), how the Amer-European part of the developed world failed to learn more from the developing world (though she ignores China's vaccine failures in Brazil, but does note the problems with Russia's Sputnik V) and more. The biggest "more" is that she does expect Johnson & Johnson's vaccine, as a one-shotter and for other reasons, including its manufacturing capability, to be a game-changer.
On the flip side, she does think that annual vaccinations will become a thing, and apparently thinks, with some others, that COVID will become endemic.
• In the short or medium term, even with the Johnson and Johnson vaccine joining the mix in the US, will we stay ahead of COVID spitting out ever-new mutants? Only if we remain vigilant on masking and social distancing for quite some time.
• Uncle Fester Dick Cheney once famously said "deficits don't matter." National GOP elected officials have tried to make them matter whenever a Dem is in the White House. But, on COVID stimulus checks and related matters, everyday Republican voters agree with Cheney. In turn, that probably scares those libertarianish types among the national GOP; it further undercuts their "starve the beast" ideas.
• Carl Zimmer looks at the coronavirus amidst ongoing scientific discussion about viruses in general and the definition of "alive."
• South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, whose state had the the nation's second highest case rate behind only similarly nutbar North Dakota as of last week, and the nation's eighth-highest death rate, despite being an almost entirely rural and semi-rural state with only one city above 100,000 (and only that one metro area above 100K and just one other above 50K), continued to lie about her alleged "success" in battling COVID. And, I don't know how much good it will do since Twitter still doesn't have a "fake news" category for reporting individual Tweets, but I reported a bunch of hers.
At the same time, she's also a hypocrite and a grifter. On her Twitter feed, right before claiming that Democrats have been fearmongering on COVID, she salutes the money South Dakota is going to get from the latest round of CARES Act money .... a bill initiated by the Democratic House in the previous Congress.
Sadly, Dingleberry Jack at Twitter, while he is working on giving us things like a "paid followers" button or whatever the hell it is, still hasn't seen fit to catch up to Hucksterman and give us a "false news" line on options for reporting Tweets or accounts.
• Dos Centavos tells us about his successful vaccination experience.
• Robert Rivard is firm about the need to continue taking the pandemic seriously
• Did the Colonial, with a family-run marketing shop, fire an additional PR consultant it brought on last year because she insisted on strict masking and social distancing protocols? Richie Whitt says yes.
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