In his most recent New York Times column Charles Blow opens with something with which I agree completely:

Never trust politicians. They are craven. It’s an occupational attribute.

Sure, there are some who are good people, tell the truth most of the time and chose careers in politics for the right reason — public service rather than personal aggrandizement.

But, politics as a genre is about power, and power corrupts.

The higher up the political ladder a politician climbs, generally speaking, the more vicious they have likely had to be and the more viciousness they have had to endure. Also, they have had to shake more and more dirty hands to raise the obscene amounts of money now needed to run campaigns, and they have likely had to make unsavory compromises in service of their own advancement.

Now, I can name some politicians who I think have largely avoided these pitfalls, but their numbers are few.

Regular readers will note how closely that tracks with themes I’ve sounded regularly here. He closes with something with which I agree in principle although not in detail:

I say that we must prosecute all people who have committed crimes and punish all those who have broken rules. The rule of law can’t simply be for the common man; it must also be for the exalted man. Because only then will the ideas of fairness and justice have meaning.

The exception I take is that he’s referring to Trump’s supporters in the Congress and elsewhere which is tarring with far too broad a brush. Between those passages he names Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, and Lindsey Graham but he fails to make a case that they have either broken laws or rules.

I won’t defend either Trump or his supporters. But if the “crimes” to which he refers is encouraging people to get out and demonstrate it will be hard to find any politician, Republican or Democrat, who has not violated it. President Trump urged Vice President Mike Pence to commit an impeachable offense which is itself an impeachable offense. Pence demurred. Further, there is an argument that his encouraging his supporters to demonstrate, which as far as I can tell did not meet the legal definition of incitement, was an impeachable offense as well.

Cruz, Hawley, and others have done that too and there’s an argument they could be impeached for it. However, not only do I think that criminal prosecution would be a bridge too far, it would further inflame the situation, another step on our path to becoming one of the phony republics we have derided all of my life. If you’re going to call for the rule of law it must comport with the actual law.

Speaking of unity here’s a passage from a recent editorial in the Chicago Tribune:

What has become acceptable commentary and behavior — harassing political opponents at home and at restaurants, engaging militias at local protest marches and more — would have been considered unthinkable and obscene by most standards and norms not too long ago. We need a reset button.

No one will be in a tougher position than Biden to glue together what is possible, to navigate ideological splits in his own party and to convince Trump voters he is their president too. Ushering out Trump is the assured part. Dealing with deep divisions and distrust among the American people is the more formidable mission. The anger that led to violence at the Capitol will not disappear with the inauguration of a new president.

What can happen, we hope, is a meaningful lowering of arms in this nation’s culture wars and its politics. A renewed effort at finding common ground in the way previous administrations did it — the sweeping policy changes of government entitlement programs enacted by President Bill Clinton, then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a Democratic administration and a GOP-controlled Congress, for example.

Because what is clear is we cannot proceed further on this trajectory of political outrage and thrashing. Our safety and security as a country, and our sacred democratic traditions, depend on taking a smarter path.

I think that’s wishful thinking. With or without Donald Trump in the White House and in the spotlight I think that things will only get worse. It doesn’t take a majority or even a large plurality to cause enormous havoc—just a few people with the will to act out their outrage.

I listened to several of the “talking heads” programs this morning. As should not be surprising the common topic of discussion was the breaching of the Capitol by rioters. There was universal condemnation of it by Republicans and Democrats alike. It was a rare instance of agreement.

Several of the Democrats highlighted the grave moral necessity of punishing not just those who participated in the rioting but the president and those (like Sens. Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley) who backed him up. I couldn’t distinguish among sincere expressions of belief, desperately trying to secure a place in today’s Democratic Party, particularly on the part of Rahm Emanuel, and battlespace preparation for the 2024 presidential elections. As I’ve said I think that the dilemma for Republicans is whether supporting Trump’s impeachment and removal will be qualifying or disqualifying for running in 2024.

I don’t think an insistence on punishment that extends beyond the rioters and the president himself bodes particularly well for the unity that President-Elect Biden has been talking about. What sort of unity is it when 51% of the voters want to punish 47% of the voters? Pointing out that not everyone who voted for Biden wants to punish those who voted for Trump doesn’t help at all. Then it becomes fewer than 50% of voters wanting to punish 47% of voters.

I’m collecting several responses to points made in comments of various posts here.

A regular commenter, reacting to the reemergence of COVID-19 in China, wrote:

and reports were that most of China was unaffected by the late winter and early spring outbreak. Could be the same virus and likely is

Earlier in the year China locked down the areas affected by COVID-19 pretty hard, closing down all forms of transportation to or from those areas. To the best of our ability to determine that was effective in limiting the spread of the disease. The main testing measure that China has, apparently, used is taking people’s temperatures.

Those approaches have limitations. Taking temperatures as a means of limiting spread assumes that there’s no asymptomatic transfer of the disease, something about which we’re still unsure. And blocking off areas only controls the spread of the disease for as long as the lockdowns are in place. It’s a delaying tactic rather than a mitigation tactic. Maybe the vaccines the Chinese have developed will halt the spread of COVID-19 in China now. Or maybe they’ll need to engage in more lockdowns.

If the supply chains of any American companies are adversely affected by these new lockdowns in China, they should be screamed at. They were warned. They have no on to blame but themselves.

The commenter is correct. There’s no way to tell whether the variant the Chinese are experiencing now is the same one they did a year ago. It could be the same strain or it could be the variant that afflicted Europe and then the United States or it could be something entirely new.

In another thread another regular commenter responded to my “what if” question about multiple repeated pandemics with this:

We all die.

I find that not only panicked but lacking in historical perspective. Outbreaks including pandemics of multiple diseases as serious as COVID-19 and many more so have been the norm during human history right up until very recent times. These diseases include smallpox, bubonic plague, tuberculosis, measles, mumps, and many others including flu. The case fatality rate of smallpox was 30%. In the 19th century as many as half of all deaths of people from the age of 15 to 35 was due to tuberculosis.

We don’t really have a great handle on the case fatality rate of COVID-19 but right now in the U. S. it appears to be around 3%, largely concentrated among the elderly.

It wasn’t until the 18th century when Edward Jenner, using the insightful and risky strategy of inoculating people against smallpox using live viruses, put us on the path we’re on now. That was accelerated in the post-war period by the use of antibiotics to control bacterial infections. Leaving the big city centers for the suburbs among other things was a way of reducing the spread of diseases which could be contracted by what’s being called “community spread”.

Somehow the human species survived that and I expect we’ll survive not just COVID-19 but the coming multiple pandemics.

One more thought. Until the 20th century in the United States the poor, middle income, and rich people all lived side by side, not segregated into different neighborhoods by income as is increasingly the case today. Many of our institutions arose while that was true and I suspect that some proportion of the deaths among the poor due to COVID-19 is a consequence of that segregation.

What I’m hearing from people in Hong Kong (in voice communications rather than written since written communications are completely insecure) is that there’s a major outbreak of COVID-19 going on in China right now and people are returning home early for New Years, fearful that lockdowns aren’t far away. I have no way of establishing the veracity or scale of the matter.

It’s a sad situation when you simply can’t believe the official statistics but that’s the world we’re in.

Businesses reeling from losses of revenue and productivity due to the pandemic and the state and local responses to it are also facing another challenge: they’re being sued by their employees and customers. Walter Olsen reports on the bumper crop of COVID-19 lawsuits in a piece in the Wall Street Journal:

In May, as the first wave of the pandemic receded, Connecticut put out guidelines for workplace reopening. “Individuals over the age of 65 or with other health conditions should not visit offices, but instead continue to stay home and stay safe.” That seemed like a sound directive, but as lawyers soon pointed out, the state had told its private employers to violate federal law. The federal Age Discrimination in Employment Act makes it unlawful to deprive older employees of any opportunity offered to younger colleagues.

You might think being assigned to work from home at full salary doesn’t count as being deprived of an opportunity, but trial lawyers have been known to argue otherwise. An at-home employee might have fewer promotion opportunities or benefit from less mentoring. Someone could try for a class action.

That isn’t an isolated example. For some employers a reopening plan might include using antibody tests to identify which employees had Covid and recovered; given likely immunity, those persons could be a good bet for jobs where personal contact is unavoidable. But June guidelines from the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission count antibody testing as a breach of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). The commission says tests for current infection are OK.

concluding:

And businesses can wind up sued if they do and sued if they don’t. If a customer believes he caught the virus on the premises, his lawyer will be glad to seize on testimony that you didn’t use temperature guns and let some visitors run around without masks.

In a saner world, Congress might rewrite these laws to immunize companies from liability for actions taken in reasonable response to health and safety risks, and develop provisions for granting emergency waivers in circumstances like those now. But most of these laws make minimal concessions to balancing costs and benefits. All of us—including the most vulnerable—pay the price for such moralism in lawmaking.

Let’s quantify this a bit. According to Littler, since March there have been more than 1,500 lawsuits filed against employers for labor and employment violations related to COVID-19:

California is leading the way with 335 cases filed, with New Jersey (171), Florida (139), and New York (120) following behind. The most common complaints have focused on retaliation (798), wrongful termination (482), workplace safety (386), and discrimination (363). The healthcare industry has been hardest hit by COVID-19 related employment litigation with 360 alleged violations, with manufacturing (161), retail (116), and hospitality (113), also seeing their share of complaints.

Check out the infographic at the link. Too bad I can’t embed it.

I’ve been warning about this development for some time. We’ve only just begun.

There are times that I think that people with whom I’ve corresponded over the years are still checking in here every once in a while. In a piece at Bloomberg Virginia Postrel sounds notes similar to those I did a couple of weeks ago:

Whether you’re laying fiber optic cable or delivering packages, that last mile is the tricky, labor-intensive, expensive part. To reach individuals, the system has to go from centralized operations to decentralized ones. That’s why we have retailers rather than ordering our toilet paper from Georgia-Pacific, and why they, in turn, often rely on distributors. “Cutting out the middleman” is a catchy slogan, but intermediaries make the system work.

When the federal government turned state agencies into the country’s vaccine distributors, it bypassed the usual supply chains. Doctors and hospitals couldn’t get Covid-19 vaccines the way they order other inoculations.

Distribution also became politicized in ways that slow down vaccination. Every shot comes with a ton of paperwork, and the rationing rules are hard to understand. Who exactly qualifies as a health-care worker or an essential employee? Is it OK for hospitals to give shots to janitors or billing clerks?

In Minnesota hospitals, one doctor who asked to remain anonymous noted in an interview, “there was a lot of focus on scheduling appointments and dividing up by departments to be sure they were fair” even if that meant delaying vaccines and potentially letting some supplies go to waste. It’s a widespread problem.

As he threatens fines for hospitals that don’t use all their vaccines, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo also signed an executive order requiring providers to certify that every recipient qualifies under the current rationing protocol. Letting someone jump the queue now risks a $1 million fine and the loss of a state license. “If you wanted to make sure that rapidly expiring vaccines distributed in 10-dose vials end up in the trash, this is how you’d do it,” observed commentator Mason Hartman on Twitter.

Micromanagement is impeding the rollout. In South Carolina, for instance, a medical assistant often gives injections in a doctor’s office, and the job requires no special certification. For Covid-19 vaccines, however, the state says that even someone with decades of experience can’t administer a shot unless they have an official credential.

Instead of leaving decisions up to medical practices that give shots every day and know who can do the job, “each state has different rules on what level of person can give a [Covid-19] vaccine,” says Craig Robbins, a primary-care physician with Kaiser Permanente in Colorado, who has been working on the health management organization’s vaccine rollout.

Distribution is hard enough without these roadblocks. Start with the numbers. At Kaiser Permanente facilities, a single vaccinator can give about 10 shots an hour, with much of the time spent filling out forms. To get to herd immunity, the U.S. needs to inject two doses several weeks apart to something like 240 million people. At 10 injections an hour, that’s 48 million hours of vaccinators’ time, 4.8 million hours a week over 10 weeks to get to early March. We’d need 120,000 vaccinators working 40-hour weeks. In a big country, that sounds doable.

I think she’s overestimating the number of inoculations an individual can make in an hour. I think that in practical terms it’s closer to four than to 10. That would mean something like needing several hundred thousand inoculators.

I think that most of her suggestions are impractical due to the vaccines’ ordering requirements and the special handling they need but I still think that a lot of facilities other than hospitals can provide the necessary refrigeration not to mention the trucks used to deliver the vaccines. Even at its presently very low incidence the possibility of anaphylaxis places additional requirements on inoculation sites. I also think that Florida has erred in making the vaccine available to all individuals over 65 but that’s another subject.

She concludes:

Covid-19 vaccines are a magnificent scientific and technological achievement. The challenges now are social and political. Meeting them requires flexibility, experimentation and trust.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of people including many in Europe who believe that anything worth doing is the job of the central government. That itself is an impediment to rapid distribution.

Here are some of George Friedman’s thoughts on the events of this week, from RealClearPolitics:

I am not able to think analytically about this, nor can I pretend that my writing predicted this. I must approach this as what I am: a citizen of a nation that gave me sanctuary, to which I owe my life and which I tried to serve as best I could. I have traveled the world and seen many acts of political rage and cruelty. I have seen coups. This may have been a blundering one, but it was a coup nonetheless, carried out with the intent to change the outcome of an election. It happened in my country, and in its capital city, and in its Capitol building. That moment made us simply another country, and not the city on a hill, shedding light on the world.

I was forced into silence by grief. When something enchanting dies, it calls for a moment of silence over what was lost. Every word uttered demeans the moment. And so I was silent. Now I speak, but what is there to say? The light of the shining city on a hill must be relit, and to relight it we must begin by willing ourselves to friendship and to refuse to despise each other regardless of disagreement. That is the start. I don’t know if we have the will or the strength to do it.

This is all opinion, not carefully thought-out analysis. And much of it is cliche. But cliches carry some truth. I have tried to understand, but now I am reduced to grief. Others will say they told me so, but then they have said so much that they must at times be right.

We did not lose our country yesterday, but we received a warning that our country is in danger. And it is most in danger, I think, from the spirit of self-righteousness that has gripped our nation. Each of us seems to hold our views as unassailable. Each of us regards other views as monstrous. From this cauldron only poison will be brewed.

I have my doubts. Or, as “Titania McGrath” recently observed, we must come together in unity and identify the people who voted the wrong way and punish them.

You owe it to yourself to read this report from the Brookings Institution on the horrific degree of misinformation among Americans about COVID-19. As is typical where you stand depends on where you sit but members of neither political party have any real apprehension of the facts. The factors they evaluated included risk by age group, how risky COVID-19 is compared to other risks, risk of severe harm if infected, and so on. A year into the pandemic and very, very few have any real notion of what’s going on.

The authors of the report attribute the gap partly due to partisan differences and partisan sources of information but also to basic innumeracy which they evaluated at 85%. I agree. I think that most people are functionally innumerate. To that I would add that most people are also functionally illiterate. “Functionally illiterate” does not mean that you can’t read or write. It means that you do not receive or communicate information using the written word. Most of the people whom I encounter on a daily basis are functionally illiterate including, amazingly enough, people with college degrees.

The challenge is not just in getting accurate information to people it is in communicating to people in a form that they will understand and believe.

My reaction on seeing the results reported by Brookings was “now do elected officials”. Especially members of Congress.