On the menu today: Our usual cold and flu season has turned into something worse than usual, reflecting the ominous-sounding “Tripledemic” of the flu, RSV, and what’s left of Covid-19; former president Donald Trump sticks to Truth Social and refuses to come back to Twitter; and after a long, long hiatus, a pop-culture podcast returns.
Coming to Terms with the ‘Tripledemic’
The declaration that the U.S. is experiencing a particularly bad flu season this winter is not inviting another round of widespread societal responses on par with what we did when Covid-19 arrived on our shores in early 2020.
I can understand if you see a headline such as, “Face masks may return amid holiday ‘tripledemic’ of covid, flu and RSV” and groan, “Aw, here we go again!” Before the Covid-19 pandemic, we did not enact public-mask requirements for cold and flu season, and there’s no reason to do so now. No one in their right mind should run around trying to resurrect the loud, angry mask wars we fought from 2020 into early 2022 when the Omicron wave finally passed.
With that said, if you’re sick, you should try to avoid coughing, sneezing, or otherwise breathing on people, and masks are a way to do that. This is not some edict from Dr. Anthony Fauci or CDC director Rochelle Walensky; this is just common sense. Even if you’re not putting another person’s life in danger by coughing into your hand and then absent-mindedly offering a handshake or turning a doorknob, it’s still not a good thing to do! Choosing to wear a mask when you’re sick and can’t avoid being around other people is the responsible choice.
Some corners of America have an intensely workaholic culture, and there are also Americans who can’t afford to take sick days. This means they’re at work or school, interacting with others, touching door handles and elevator buttons and stairwell railings, and inadvertently spreading their viruses around. We would all be better off if sick people stayed home when they were ill, and if that isn’t possible, if they wore a mask and washed their hands frequently. But human beings are rarely blessed with an excessive abundance of common sense.
The CDC estimates that, so far this season, “There have been at least 8.7 million illnesses, 78,000 hospitalizations, and 4,500 deaths from flu.” The number of flu-related hospital admissions reported to HHS during the week that ended November 26 — the most recent week for which data are available — is almost doubled compared with the previous week. There are lots of Americans who came back from Thanksgiving with some sort of sniffle, cough, sore throat, body aches, etc.
The average American probably hadn’t heard much about respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) until recently, but it isn’t new. The CDC characterizes it as “a common respiratory virus that usually causes mild, cold-like symptoms. Most people recover in a week or two, but RSV can be serious, especially for infants and older adults.” In a typical pre-Covid year, RSV caused 58,000-80,000 hospitalizations among children ages five or below, 60,000-120,000 hospitalizations among adults 65 years and older, 6,000-10,000 deaths among adults 65 years and older, and 100-300 deaths in children ages five or below. If those numbers seem high, remember that the U.S. has roughly 18 million children ages five or below, and roughly 55 million senior citizens age 65 or older.
You notice that you’re seeing more public worry and discussion about the flu and RSV, and that’s because Covid-19 is less of a problem. Much of the CDC’s traffic-light-style map, showing the level of Covid-19 in each county, is green. Just 5 percent of U.S. counties have a “high” level of Covid cases and 24 percent have “moderate” levels.
As we saw during the peak of Omicron, lots of people getting sick at the same time has a domino effect on everyone else, including healthy people. Lots of convenience stores are reporting shortages of over-the-counter cough and cold medicine. One western Oklahoma school district switched back to distance learning because “Monday morning, 161 students called in sick which [superintendent Rob] Friesen said was about 35 percent of their district population.” In-person learning is scheduled to resume today.
Why is this year’s cold-and-flu season so rough? One theory is that we spent almost all of one year (2020) and portions of another year (2021) taking all those precautions against Covid-19, which meant that our bodies encountered fewer viruses of any kind. The CDC concluded that the 2020–2021 flu season had “dramatically fewer flu illnesses, hospitalizations, and deaths” than previous years, and then characterized the 2021–2022 flu season as “mild” or “low.” Our bodies have had a nearly three-year vacation from fighting off influenza viruses, which means that they’re out of practice.
And with our lives still being shaped by the decisions made during the pandemic, it’s a good time to reexamine those decisions. (Heck, even the Chinese government is finally giving up on the always-unworkable “Zero Covid ” philosophy.)
I don’t agree with everything in this David Wallace Wells New York Times column, particularly the contention that Ben Shapiro was “blithe” about the deaths of the elderly from Covid-19. I don’t think that’s a fair characterization of Shapiro’s comment that, “If somebody who is 81 dies of COVID-19, that is not the same thing as somebody who is 30 dying of COVID-19.”
But Wells brings up two points that a lot of powerful voices didn’t want to acknowledge during the pandemic. First, vaccination dramatically reduced the risk of death in the elderly and immunocompromised, but it did not eliminate it, which is why vaccinated people are now a larger percentage of Covid deaths than unvaccinated people. Wells writes:
Vaccines are not as effective among older adults because the immune system weakens with age. It’s much harder to train older immune systems, and that training diminishes more quickly. In Americans between the ages of 65 and 79, for instance, vaccination reduced mortality risk about eightfold, compared to the unvaccinated. . . .
Given the underlying age skew, a twice-boosted 87-year-old shares a similar risk of Covid death as a never-vaccinated 70-year-old. Which is to say, some real risk. If it was ever comfortable to say that the unconscionable levels of American deaths were a “pandemic of the unvaccinated,” it is surely now accurate to describe the ongoing toll as a “pandemic of the old.”
Second, the desire to get as many Americans vaccinated as possible spurred many influential voices to ignore or dispute that different people had different levels of risk from a Covid-19 infection. The typical 30-year-old faced much less risk of serious consequences from a Covid-19 infection than the typical 70-year-old, and the typical ten-year-old faced much, much less risk from a Covid-19 infection than adults. But openly discussing those facts might make some 30-year-olds blow off getting vaccinated and might make some parents conclude that getting their kids vaccinated wasn’t that important. In light of that fear, a lot of public-health experts chose to pretend that Covid was equally dangerous to everyone.
(Hey, remember monkeypox? Remember how the overwhelming majority of cases were among sexually active gay men — and that by August, 99 percent of cases were in males, and 94 percent of cases were in men who reported having sex with other men? Remember how even though monkeypox wasn’t technically a sexually transmitted disease, because it spread through close contact, it was spreading in a manner similar to a sexually transmitted disease? Remember how President Biden chose to characterize monkeypox as “something that everybody should be concerned about”? Have you noticed that many of our public-health officials really have difficulty being honest about who is most at risk from certain maladies?)
Wells continues:
Vaccination and natural immunity had indeed dramatically reduced the country’s overall mortality risk. But while it’s comforting to believe that protection is a choice, for some populations it isn’t. And in moving pretty swiftly from treating everyone as high-risk to treating everyone as low-risk, we neglected to pay much attention to the differential of risk: that even if the average American had reduced his or her chances of dying by a factor of five or 10, 300 or more Americans might still be dying each day for many months, and there were probably some targeted things to do about that.
I think you have a much better chance of persuading someone if you level with them and tell them the whole story. But what do I know. I’m not a doctor.
An Inconvenient Truth (Social)
Over on the Washington Post op-ed page, I notice that former president Donald Trump hasn’t come back to Twitter and instead continues to use his own social-media platform, Truth Social, even though he has a much, much larger audience on Twitter. There’s something curious about that, considering Trump’s past near-addiction to Twitter and willingness to break contracts.
ADDENDUM: It’s been nearly two years, but Mickey and I finally found the time to tape another edition of the old pop-culture podcast, this one focused on Christmas. We cover Hallmark Christmas movies and those other-network rival versions, the Guardians of the Galaxy Christmas special, house-decorating competitions, and Mariah Carey’s effort to officially claim the title “Queen of Christmas.” Part one of the episode is here, part two is here.