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A recurring theme through all of this is how we really, really need to re-center the "flatten the curve" messaging from March 2020 in all COVID policy discussions. We lost that thread through 2020 and shifted to "crush the virus" once the vaccines hit, which was never realistic.

Every public policy should be aimed at keeping hospitals at reasonable capacity, and we should be normalizing the perception of COVID non-severity for the vaccinated, especially the under-50 vaccinated crowd.

Love the idea of making a show of stockpiling key supplies for the next wave, especially therapeutics like paxlovid. Demonstrating that we are getting ready will give people a sense of security as the next wave emerges, which should blunt the bad feels and keep things humming longer.

Good post as always!

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The Biden administration ought to do what it can to get CDC to shift its messaging to giving recommendations to both individuals and policy makers that are localizable depending on the state of vaccinations, and the new cases, and varying over time. Likewise, CDC should be recommending test to stay and test to return for schools.

Every mention of “mask” ought to be answered with “vaccine.”

Also, it’s not too soon to start an autopsy of why FDA and CDC performed so poorly.

The message about getting the world vaccinated needs to be integrated. Whatever degree of “alert” needed (and actual preparations for) for the next wave should be put in the context of the still low vaccination rates worldwide (including the US which is down at around rank 55.

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Feb 8, 2022·edited Feb 8, 2022

I live in a super blue area and can’t get anyone to go out to eat with us without paying extreme lip service to Covid (“yup! They have a mask policy if you’re not vaccinated. We can go at 5:30 to avoid crowds, etc). The social calendar is robust but is mostly driven by parents desire for play dates to which adult fun is proxy’d into.

Now, not to absolutely inflame the senses of slow boring’s overeducated community of well to do liberals. But I did find a hack for this.

When Covid came on I needed stuff to do and joined a country club. I gotta say. It is awesome. You all have go out to the bar/restaurant pretty often to hit the minimums and it’s like you walk into a restaurant/bar that’s always packed. No masks. Everyone fist bumpin and everyone is pumped to see you. Country clubs are the ultimate Covid hack.

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I've been wondering how the baby boomers retiring is affecting employment. It's a huge cohort and most are at or near retirement age. Did a lot of them decide to finally retire when covid hit? Has that affected the labor market? Haven't seen any data about this.

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To Matt's point about "how robust American society will prove to be against future waves of the virus", it seems like we're not talking hardly at all about a population that I suspect is fairly large--fully vaccinated and even boosted in 11/2020 but still kind of cautious of the unknown, and has now gotten what amounts to an omicron-sourced cold.

I might propose that now that these folks have hit for the cycle, so to speak, and seen that it was no big deal, they may be substantially *less* cautious, not more.

I know there's at least one of us out there!

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'preparing a message of “it’s good and appropriate to keep traveling and dining with friends and family and living life”': Biden has been doing that to some extent, tweeting how vaccinated people should feel free to live their lives. More of that would be good.

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Restaurants in Boise are Booming. My brother-in-law opened up a burger joint in the middle of the pandemic summer of 2020. Making money hand over fist. Last Friday he had record sales. Every week is growing. I took my wife out to some expensive place that was pretty packed a couple of weeks ago.

Besides for employees being temporarily out, we really didn’t see a reduction in customers.

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founding

Is it a bad thing if restaurants have an annual lull in January? (I suspect they already do, but this would be a bigger one going forward.)

Is it bad for Los Angeles that no one goes out on rain days? It certainly makes it hard for a lot of businesses to plan.

I worry that asking people to go out to restaurants to help the economy when they’d rather not gets a bit broken-windows-y.

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One of the biggest problems if you are boosted and not at high risk is that getting covid will impact your activity schedule much more than a normal flu, to say nothing of a cold. I know many people who have missed planned trips because of a positive test. And this carries pretty high cost, even if you bought trip insurance. I don't know what the answer here is, but I think it's going to be a hindrance to achieving normal levels of entertainment activities as long as we continue to have periodic huge covid waves.

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This will not be a popular opinion, but I think the virus restrictions only end when there is a Republican in office.

That doesn’t mean I’m voting R because ‘removing COVID restrictions’ isn’t my primary policy issue. But I’d be amazed if I took a flight unmasked before 2025.

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Has anyone else followed the Covid situation in Israel? The death rate this winter was even worse than last winter. The problem seems to be that boosters were given to people last August, and few people got a fourth dose (reporting that it was not effective appears to be erroneous). The implication is that people constantly need to have antibodies topped up every few months to remain protected - hopes that other parts of one’s immune system would be effective with covid have been dashed. This is not a sustainable strategy for all but the very old or impaired.

This suggests ‘going back to normal’ is not workable while covid is still around. The hope is that it becomes less virulent over time, but this is not guaranteed.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-disease/israels-rise-covid-deaths-important-lesson-uk-vaccines/

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I think based on the loud twitter arguments there is a perception that masking and other NPIs are an issue that splits Democrats. But my supposition would be that there is a large quantity of people who just want to go along-to-get-along, and they will be happy to follow whatever lead political leadership gives. So standing pat with a policy that doesn't really have a coherent rationale and kind of makes everybody mad is the worst option because the people who don't have strong feelings just see everybody fighting about it.

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It seems like every month, when the jobs report hits, it's accompanied by a small herd of identical "takes" reminding everyone that the report isn't accurate and always gets revised later. Is the Department of Labor obligated to provide the raw, unrevised monthly jobs report, or would it be possible to move to a system where we stop putting info we know is bad into the economy and instead accept accurate but slightly stale numbers a few weeks later?

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The administration isn’t in the driver’s seat on this one, the media is.

And y’all haven’t, present company excepted, covered yourselves in glory here.

We need more of this: https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2022/02/07/1057245449/the-future-of-the-pandemic-is-looking-clearer-as-we-learn-more-about-infection

And less of this: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/12/omicron-pandemic-giving-up/621004/

And the only way to get there is for outlets to start exercising responsibility and dictating closer editorial control over their idiot young staffers.

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Does Matt not believe the daily covid death statistics or has he just stopped caring?According to the Times, the 14-day average is 2,598 per day and still increasing. John’s Hopkins says the 7-day average is 2,329, off slightly from the recent peak.

These are huge numbers, bigger than during the first wave, bigger than during the summer 2020 wave, almost as big as early winter 2020-21.

A third of Matt’s article was about Omicron, yet, even as America cruises towards its 1 millionth covid death, he never mentions these figures. Instead, he wants to focus on the economy over caution. This is the opposite of his position throughout 2020.

A society that is willing to tolerate 1 million covid deaths never needed to lock down, never needed to close schools and certainly had no business closing parks. All we needed to do was help old people shelter in place and develop vaccines. Focused protection would have worked better: 1) give subsidies to help senior members of multigenerational families rent hotel rooms; 2) hire teachers aids to supervise kids while older teachers led zoom classes; and 3) given generous unemployment for older workers. This would have cost much less than the $7 trillion we spent.

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What is up with mining and logging? Why would these industries see a drop in employment? any idea of size/percent of labor force this segment is?

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