As I often say here, I try avoid making predictions, especially about the future. (Yes, highly original.) However, to the extent I have relevant expertise and there is good enough information to fit into the model, it is sometimes helpful.
Joe Biden will assume the presidency on January 20 confronting enormous problems. Right now, it's conceivable that Democrats will effectively control the Senate, which would make a huge difference, but that will require winning two head-to-head Senate races in Georgia. That seems a less than 50/50 bet, but without the Dumpster on the ticket it's hard to say how motivated Georgia wingnuts will be. And Biden managed to squeak out a win there.
So setting that aside, Covid-19 will very likely be an even bigger problem than it is right now. You've probably all seen this:
And no, it's not because of more testing. Actually there isn't really much more testing, but the test positivity rate is high and climbing in many states, where it shows an epidemic out of control. Hospitals are filling up, which is a rock hard indicator, and the daily death count is rising. That's a lagging indicator so it's going to rise much further. It's already about 140 above the mid-October low, so at that rate we'll be well above 1,000 a day in the next couple of weeks.
While it's possible there will be an Emergency Use Authorization from the FDA for a vaccine by early next year, that is very far from the end. In the first place, the vaccine trials aren't really designed to measure the important end points. As Peter Doshi explains in the (paywalled) BMJ:
Contrary to prevailing assumptions (including those of a former Food and Drug Administration commissioner8), none of the vaccine trials are designed to detect a significant reduction in hospital admissions, admission to intensive care, or death.9 Rather than studying severe disease, these mega-trials all set a primary endpoint of symptomatic covid-19 of essentially any severity: a laboratory positive result plus mild symptoms such as cough and fever count as outcome events.
The problem is, obviously, that isn't what we care about, we care about hospitalizations, deaths, and long-term complications. It doesn't necessarily follow that reducing the chance of any symptoms is highly correlated with the chance of serious disease. The reason the companies chose this endpoint is because it will require smaller trials to establish it. Furthermore, establishing the safety of any vaccine requires at least several months of follow-up. So whether doctors will encourage their patients to get vaccinated under an Emergency Use Authorization is unclear. In any case, even if they do and even if the vaccine really is effective -- which we won't even know when it rolls out -- it will take at least six months and probably more than that to deliver it to enough of the population to have much impact. That's assuming people will accept it.
So I'm afraid we'll be distancing and masking and not crowding into bars and football stadiums for a long time now. If that doesn't happen, we'll be stuffing bodies into refrigerated trucks all over the country. How people will feel about that and where it will take the economy and civil society is unknowable.
President Biden will have many other enormous challenges, which I will address anon.
3 comments:
The good news is: with Biden's victory, we have a CHANCE. It's the entrance ticket to the attempt to save Homo sapiens, to teach social justice and history on the way to creating a society that treats people equally and teaches truth and compassion.
Had the Orange Twittler won a second term, we'd all be living in Completelyfuckedville.
Positive thinking doesn't always work; but negative thinking always never works. Trump, as usual, is the OPPOSITE of what he claims to be. He isn't into "the power of positive thinking" ... he's into "the power of delusional, aggrandized thinking."
What is INCREDIBLY disturbing to me is that margin of "victory" for Shitler--a completely excrescent, horrible human being with no redeeming qualities--in the states he won. 70% of people in Wyoming voted for this piece of shit! In ND, where people are dropping like flies because of his mismanagement of Covid-19, 65% of people who voted wanted him for president!
So much ignorance. Could it be called the "heartland" because so many people have no idea how to use their fucking brains to discern reality? Or are there simply a lot of people in these states who are as horribly ignorant and racist as Donald Shitler?
I like to believe in the basic goodness of people; but what I seem to see in the central part of the country and much of the South is racism, ignorance, misogyny, the abdication of critical thinking that is apparent in the ironically-named "bible belt" (where they don't read either bible, because if they did they'd know what bullshit the Hebrew and Christian bibles are), and meanness.
Education--as in factual education about the founding of this country on a genocide, and the colonies' expansion into the slaughter of enslavement, with 14 million Africans losing their lives JUST ON THE TRIP OVER--and illegal immigration to North America by the descendants of the floundering fathers--is, IMO, the answer.
People can spend their entire lives committed to bullshit like racism, naked capitalism, and the pursuit of power, and the end result is that their entire lives on this Earth will have passed with their total engagement to meaninglessness and lies, and making the world worse than they found it.
These nasty-ass motherfuckers are the descendants of Donald J. Shitler. Any questions about where I stand?
Here's one of the finest things I can say about a very fine man, Joe Biden:
To quote H.W. Longfellow, "He that respects himself is safe from others; he wears a coat of mail that none can pierce."
Here's a guy who could stand on a stage with the Rumpster and not be sullied by him! Think of it: we've elected a guy who came into close contact with a man who sullies everything and everyone who comes near him, and he remained true to himself--because who he is is real. He is an authentic human being.
That is great cause for hope. Another quote, attributed to Albert Schweitzer, gives me great hope after Joe's election--after four years of the most horrible example I can imagine:
"Example is not the main thing in influencing others; it is the only thing."
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