On the menu today: It’s been a long time since this newsletter focused on the Covid-19 pandemic, but the story of the pandemic isn’t quite over yet. Cases are rising significantly from the numbers last spring, and while the average daily death rate thankfully hasn’t risen at the same rate, it’s higher than the relative quiet about the issue would suggest. You can still find some fearmongering coverage that treats the BA.5 variant as menacing, even though it isn’t more virulent than previous strains. Also, it turns out Americans aren’t all that eager to vaccinate their kids. And new variant-focused vaccines are likely to come by fall . . . but will those new variants still be our primary problem in a few months?
Where Are We Now with the Virus?
Yesterday the U.S. reported 190,000 new cases of Covid-19 — about as many as on December 21, 2021, when the Omicron wave was picking up steam. For the overwhelming majority of the newly infected, this bout with Covid will come and go like a summer cold — an annoyance, but far from a life-threatening health crisis. But our current daily average of deaths is probably a bit higher than you expected, at 430 per day.
Covid-19 is still killing people: More of them are unvaccinated than vaccinated, but there are some vaccinated and boosted in the Covid-19 deaths. Those over 65 and unvaccinated are the most at risk, followed by those over 65 and vaccinated but not boosted (at much lower risk), and the senior citizens at least risk are those who are vaccinated and boosted.
At this moment, few Americans seem all that worried about Covid-19, and the media that rarely missed an opportunity to offer dire predictions about the virus are now largely quiet on this issue, compared with their coverage of current national arguments about abortion, gun control, the January 6 Committee, inflation, and so on.
But you can still find fearmongering if you look for it, as in CNN’s recent headline warning “The ‘worst variant’ is here,” which spurred Nate Silver to fume that the headline is “badly misleading.”
The variant CNN is referring to is BA.5, which represented 65 percent of the cases in the U.S. from July 3 through July 9. It is rapidly displacing the variant BA.2.12.1.
(You may recall a lot of concern last summer about variants being referred to by their country of origin, which was allegedly going to lead to xenophobia. This prompted a much-hyped shift to Greek letters, which made it sound like we’re being attacked by a bunch of fraternities and sororities. Now the world’s medical community wants the public to know the differences among Omicron sub-variants BA.5, BA.4, BA.2, and BA.2.12.1, which makes it sound like we’re being attacked by the Dewey decimal system.)
That CNN article states that “some experts think there could be as many as 1 million new infections every day in the broader US population — 10 times higher than the official count.”
This would mean that every day, roughly 900,000 Americans catch the BA.5 variant and either don’t notice it or shrug it off as a routine summer cold. If lots of people catch BA.5 and they don’t feel sufficiently sick to go to the doctor, that’s good news, not bad news. If people catch BA.5 and they don’t go to the hospital, that’s a win for us. And if people catch BA.5 and they don’t die, that’s the most important win!
Another key point is that apparently it is easier to get reinfected with BA.5 if you have had Covid-19 before:
A recent ABC News analysis of state data found that, as of June 8, there have been more than 1.6 million reinfections across 24 states, but experts say the number is likely much higher.
“These are not the real numbers because many people are not reporting cases,” Dr. Ali Mokdad, an epidemiologist with the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation in Seattle, told ABC News.
Remember how many times in 2021 you heard that the reason that the pandemic hadn’t ended was because of the unvaccinated? Remember how many times you heard the phrase “this is a pandemic of the unvaccinated”? As many Americans learned over the course of 2021 and into the Omicron wave, vaccinated and boosted people can get infected too, and with 260 million vaccinated Americans, there’s a good chance that some vaccinated people spread the virus to others.
Vaccination is not a magic wand that dispels the virus; its value is in mitigating the effects of infection. And the vaccine’s effects don’t last forever — or, more specifically, your body gradually gets less effective at fighting off the particular pathogen, while the Covid-19 virus is gradually mutating into new and less familiar forms.
Because BA.5 is sufficiently different from previous forms of Covid-19, there’s a higher chance you’ll get reinfected. It’s fair for the young and healthy to wonder if getting a fourth shot right now is worth it; those boosters are training your body to fight off the earlier version of the virus. (The CDC currently recommends Americans age 50 and older get their fourth shot if they haven’t gotten one yet.) The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is urging vaccine makers to reformulate their Covid-19 shots to target the BA.4 and BA.5 Omicron subvariants, with the expectation that this fall and winter will bring a new booster campaign. It’s also fair to ask whether by fall and winter the most common version of Covid-19 floating around will be yet another sufficiently distinct variant.
But amid all this concern, the sentence in that CNN News report linked above that deserves to be in big, bold letters is this one: “The variant does not appear to lead to more severe illness.” BA.5 is different enough that your body won’t know how to fight off the infection quickly, but thankfully, it’s not more virulent, more powerful, or more deadly than previous variants. That’s going to make BA.5 frustrating, but we’re not back to March 2020 again.
There is something a little odd about how the pandemic was the overwhelming, all-encompassing, dominant factor in American life for nearly two years, and now it’s a nonfactor unless you or someone you know is currently infected. (The “health emergency” on the White House’s mind these days is access to abortion.) From the media coverage of vaccines for young children, you would have thought the U.S. had massive nationwide demand, frustrated by the slow-moving FDA approval process. But Americans are not rushing out to vaccinate their children:
Since they became eligible last fall, 36.6 percent of 5- to 11-year-olds have received one Covid-19 shot and only 30 percent are fully vaccinated, compared to 69 percent of adults aged 18 to 49. Public health experts and doctors attribute the slow uptake in part to the fact that many parents don’t believe that the vaccine is necessary, effective, or that its benefits outweigh any risks. . . .
So far, about 2,671,800 children under 5 — of the nearly 19 million newly eligible — have received at least one dose of the vaccine since the FDA gave emergency authorization to the two manufacturers’ drugs on June 18, according to the CDC.
The Omicron wave of the Covid-19 pandemic peaked around January 13 of this year, when more than 869,000 new cases were reported. The wave featured a steep incline and a steep decline; by late March, America was averaging fewer than 30,000 new cases per day.
And for many Americans, the pandemic ended around then. By that point, more than 80 million Americans had reported cases, and likely millions more tested positive at home and never reported their cases to health authorities. The mask mandates ended in every state, and eventually at airports and other public places. Public schools reopened, and now even the teachers’ unions want to pretend they led the charge to reopen schools instead of dragging their feet, every step of the way. Americans went back into movie theaters, basketball arenas, and convention halls.
And yet, those old disputes about the rules still crop up in unexpected places:
[Royals infielder Whit] Merrifield is one of 10 [Kansas City] Royals players who won’t make the trip with the team to Toronto to play July 14–17, leaving the club with a depleted roster before Kansas City heads into the All-Star break. Players have known since the collective bargaining agreement that was signed in March and the release of the season’s schedule that if they did not receive the COVID-19 vaccine, they could not play in Toronto.
Over in China, Shanghai is largely reopened, but locals fear another lockdown is coming, as other cities are instituting partial lockdowns.
The ordeal of the pandemic inflicted serious wounds on the country — not just the more than a million Americans dead and far-reaching economic devastation, but the further tearing of our already-fraying national social fabric. A lot of public-health experts proved themselves insanely risk-averse, content to keep Americans locked up in their homes for months; a lot of elected officials made clear they felt no need to live by their own decrees; plenty of governors and local school officials shrugged off the infliction of near-catastrophic learning loss and psychologically harmful social isolation on kids; and plenty of busybodies relished appointing themselves the mask and social-distancing police in public spaces. To adapt a phrase from Tom Wolfe, we just lived through the Bonfire of the Credibilities — and we’re still navigating how to live with the significantly less deadly, but still persistent, problem of the virus.
I’m Feeling Nostalgic about the Early Seasons of That Nostalgic Show
Because we all need something a little lighter, yesterday I laid out my assessment of the recent fourth season of Stranger Things (note: spoilers at that link). Credit the Duffer brothers and their creative team for being willing to experiment with a popular show: making much longer episodes, darkening the tone and stepping into indisputable horror-movie territory, leaving the main setting of Hawkins for long stretches, and willing to put characters like Max, Eleven, Lucas, and Steve into new emotional territory. The characters remain as likeable, relatable, and fun to watch as ever. But not everything worked, and what was once this charming, ’80s-nostaglia-filled, suspenseful story of a seemingly ordinary small town with a scary monster lurking offscreen now increasingly resembles one of those overstuffed, explosion-filled summer blockbusters at the multiplex. Bigger isn’t always better, but that ominous closing scene suggests the fifth and final season will be the biggest yet.
ADDENDUM: FINAL CALL for National Review Institute’s Burke to Buckley Fellowship Program, this year in Chicago and Dallas. Applications for the program, designed for mid-career professionals, close on Friday, July 15. Over eight weeks you will enjoy dinner with friends and discussions on the foundations of conservative thought. Register today: https://nrinstitute.org/programs/burke