Coronavirus, week 71B: Delta and the future, and more Abbott

From last night, before we get to the initial main header? It may just be temporary, but even temporary buys time. The Texas Supremes told Abbott and Paxton that they would NOT overturn any lower court temporary restraining orders against Abbott's mask mandate ban. Instead, this will play out through the normal court process.

Meanwhile, Paris ISD found a novel way to be safe AND tell Abbott to fuck himself in the loophole. Masks are part of the dress code there.

On the big picture? Here's my bottom-line thought:

.@JudgeClayJ If I can be presumptuous enough as a newspaper editor to offer legal-tied thought to the late Strong Arm's best bud? Abbott w/GA-38 essentially declared an "ANTIEMERGENCY" in contravention of state emergency statutes to shut you and other local officials down.

— Crushes Xi Jinping Thought Kool-Aid peddlers 🚩🌻 (@AFCC_Esq) August 20, 2021

And now, to the regular programming that had originally started this.

Ed Yong talks in detail about just that issue, the Delta variant. He focuses in part on one issue I've long noted about Merika: "magical thinking."

He also puts "breakthrough" infections into context. He says that with Pfizer and Moderna, and other mRNA vaccines, they're very low. He doesn't mention Johnson and Johnson. (I don't know what other vaccines follow its adenovirus basis.)

But, on transmissibility by the vaccinated? We're still in the woods as a society:

Delta’s extreme transmissibility negates some of the community-level protection that vaccines offer. If no other precautions are taken, Delta can spread through a half-vaccinated country more quickly than the original virus could in a completely unvaccinated country.

And, that's the key: as a society, not individuals.

Yong tackles that next:

Here, then, is the current pandemic dilemma: Vaccines remain the best way for individuals to protect themselves, but societies cannot treat vaccines as their only defense.

He then discusses wingnut governors such as Strangeabbott and DeSatan before noting there are options:

There are better ways to do this. On a federal level, Congress could make funding contingent on local leaders being able to make their own choices, Lindsay Wiley of American University, an expert in public-health law, told me. On a state level, leaders could pass mask mandates like Nevada’s, which is “ideal,” Julia Raifman, a health-policy expert at Boston University, told me. It automatically turns on in counties that surpass the CDC’s definition of high transmission and shuts down in counties that fall below it. An off-ramp is always in sight, the public can see why decisions have been made, and “policy makers don’t have to constantly navigate the changing science,” Raifman said.

There you go.

Finally?

Delta has ensured that COVID will remain with us as an endemic disease, just as the Spanish flu eventually became modern influenza.

===

Delta has also raised the standard for herd immunity, and may, for practical purposes, have put it out of reach.

 

Politico shows how antiquated state public health systems, from old and inadequate computers through lack of personnel on to hospitals engaging in bad reporting practices, has had state reporting on COVID far, far behind the real-time curve and otherwise problematic.

The Atlantic tackles timetables and other issues for having a vaccine available for children under 12.

China appears to have invented a fake Swiss doctor, and more importantly, a fake Facebook account for him, to spread disinformation claiming that WHO's work about searching for the origins of the pandemic would become politicized. The Swiss embassy raised the issue of the nonexistent doctor, but naively, or more, kowtowingly? said that it assumed this was done in good faith. I thought a country that was armed to the teeth against invasion had more balls than that. Rainier Shea, Margaret Flowers and Howie Hawkins, Max Blumenthal and other Xi Jinping Thought stanners have yet to weigh in.