Variants Require Restrictions And Vaccinations And More Restrictions Mein Führer!!!

WaPo |  If you live in the northeastern part of our country, you don’t put your winter jackets into storage at the first sign of spring because you know a cold snap is likely lurking around the corner. The same must be true of the pandemic.

No matter where you live, it is too early to relax restrictions that continue to have a critical role in controlling this pandemic. From California to Maine, Florida to Seattle, the covid-19 winter is not yet done, and highly infectious variants are threatening new storms.

Vaccination numbers are climbing steadily, and coronavirus cases have been declining. The end of the pandemic is in sight. But the latest national data, which show case rates have plateaued, indicate that we are not there yet. Over the past week, we have seen about 50,000 new cases reported daily. That’s not far from the height of the surge last summer.

National data also miss disturbing state and local trends: About 15 states have more cases than they did two weeks ago, and about 19 states have higher test positivity rates than two weeks ago, indicating higher rates of infection. Hospitalizations, which typically lag infections by two to three weeks, have begun to inch up in some places. Deaths from covid-19, which typically lag another two weeks behind hospitalizations, may rise again in April — all while states begin to loosen restrictions. That’s a problem.

Blame it on the variants of this virus. The B.1.1.7 variant, the most widespread of the variants identified to date, is between 43 and 90 percent more infectious than the version of the virus we have been living with for most of the past year. And this variant was estimated to make up 30 to 40 percent of U.S. infections earlier this month, meaning about 20,000 new cases each day are likely B.1.1.7 and are way more infectious. Vaccinations are in a footrace against these variants, and the variants are giving us a run for our money.

Consider what’s happening in Florida, where thousands are celebrating spring break without masks or social distancing. Right now, the rate of cases and deaths in Florida are about the same as nationally, and the number of daily infections is holding steady. But the B.1.1.7 variant now represents more than half of Florida’s cases. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is right to warn about a new surge of illness, hospitalization and death as a result.

B.1.1.7 is on a trajectory to become the dominant variant in the United States in the next couple of weeks. To understand why this matters, look to Europe, where the rise of the variant saw large increases in cases, hospitalizations and deaths. Data suggest that B.1.1.7 is so much more infectious that it can shift outbreaks into overdrive, turning small upswings in cases into lethal, prolonged spikes. And there’s some data that it is more deadly, too.

So are we destined for a fourth surge? Not necessarily. The vaccines in use in the United States are effective against B.1.1.7, and we are much further along in our vaccine rollout than Europe, which had barely begun doling out shots when the variants were picking up steam. But we must keep vaccinating, and fast. By the end of April, every high-risk American should have at least one dose in their arms, massively reducing the risk of death from infection. Until that happens, we should keep restrictions in place. We are doing a great job on vaccinations. But on keeping public health measures in place until high-risk people are vaccinated? Not so much.

 

The ONLY GIBBERISH More Ridiculous Than Anti-Racist Gibberish - Is Economics...!!!

WaPo | The market gyrations involving GameStop’s 64-fold rise in price since August are certainly eye-opening. How a money-losing company whose stock previously traded less than 10 million shares a day can shoot up to trading 50 million-plus shares in a day — and cause the stock price of a completely unrelated but similarly named Australian company (GME Resources) to rise 50 percent on Thursday — is hard to reconcile with today’s uber-efficient high-frequency markets.

Media coverage routinely refers to GameStop’s price surge as a bubble. But what are financial bubbles — and what causes them? As I noted when writing about bubbles in 2008 in the Review of Financial Studies, the phenomenon had been around for centuries — in the 18th century, Scottish economist Adam Smith called it “overtrading.” But that doesn’t explain what starts a bubble in the first place. Plenty of economists, historians and others have tried.

The Swedish economist Knut Wicksell, in an observation that resonates today, argued in 1898 that bubbles are attributable to interest rates that are too low. In 1929 — we know what happened in the markets then — the Dutch economist historian N.W. Posthumus cited the entrance of nonprofessional buyers fueled by credit. In this view, today’s Federal Reserve and the Reddit crowd would seem natural culprits.

What you need to know about GameStop’s stock price chaos

An alternative view in history is that bubbles can emerge if traders are rational but markets are irrational. The economist and historian Charles P. Kindleberger makes this argument in his classic 1978 book, “Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises.” What drives market irrationality, Kindleberger says, is the fallacy of composition: Each trader believes he can sell at a higher price, and if he can in fact do so, then it is rational for him to buy. But not everyone in the market can do that, so the market as a whole behaves irrationally.

A variant on this irrationality of the market theme underlies the “beauty contest” analogy offered in 1936 by the English economist John Maynard Keynes. He argued that individuals do not pick stocks based on what they think a firm is worth, but rather on what they think other people will think it is worth. (Has Keynes’s “beauty contest” morphed into today’s “chat room”?) In that description, each individual is acting rationally, but the market overall is not.

Short sellers in GameStop — mostly hedge funds that had been betting massively on the company’s stock to fall — had reportedly lost $23.6 billion as of Wednesday. They may find little consolation in the dictum often attributed to Keynes: “Markets can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.”

White Nationalism Worse Than A Disease!!!

wired |  Our chimeric infectious cancer analogy for white nationalism might require something related but more focused: a war on white nationalism that is much lower on empathy than we’ve ever treated it, and higher on an appreciation for how large and disruptive a menace it truly is. Such a war would include the same administrative and legislative heft that has been given to the wars on drugs and foreign terrorism. (The latter served as the motivation for an entirely new executive department.) It would involve an intersection of experts from the intelligence, legal, criminal justice, and scholarly communities. And these experts would be charged with identifying all of the places that the infectious cancer hides in society, addressing the vulnerabilities in the American immune system, and cutting off the communication channels that serve as a bloodstream (e.g., social media) for white nationalism to further propagate, causing disseminated destruction. The Biden administration has already outlined formal plans for improved surveillance of emerging infectious disease in response to Covid-19. A similar process to address domestic terrorism could just as easily be activated.

Cancer analogies also have limits that oversimplify the blight of white nationalism. For one, cancer is driven by an undirected process driven by the laws of natural selection: Cancerous cells don’t know they’re disrupting anything. The 2021 strain of white nationalism, however, is engineered specifically for destruction. It is not a set of ideas that undermine the laws of the land by happenstance. Their purpose is to undermine them actively and directly.

These distinctions are more than just semantic: Too many narratives of white nationalism incorrectly depict its actors as exclusively low-class and uneducated. This trope says that the white nationalists aren’t really all that bad but are misguided, acting on ignorance, alienation, or economic anxiety.

This ragtag caricature of white nationalism evokes a cancerous cell blindly fomenting catastrophe through directionless meandering. The reality of white nationalism is closer to the opposite: It is a well-oiled machine, driven by nefarious actors with very specific goals in mind. And in this way, white nationalism isn’t much like cancer at all. There are no innocent, guileless actors, guilty only of being short-sighted. The purveyors of white nationalism live by a wicked creed that explicitly dehumanizes others.

If white nationalism isn’t a birth defect, a virus, or a cancer, should we dispense with disease analogies altogether? Why bother with explanatory vehicles at all?

The answer is that disease, in the abstract sense, does effectively capture the rot of white nationalism in important ways (many people even felt physically ill after seeing images of Charlottesville and the Capitol insurrection).

The challenge resides in identifying the right pathology. Finding one has no necessary allegiance to any existing class of disease—we’re free to cut and paste features of different diseases, even use our science-fiction mind to dream up one better fit to describe this unique blight.

The chimeric, hypothetical disease most like white nationalism resembles an infectious cancer—a rare class of diseases where malignant cells can be transmitted between people. The most famous of these is the devil tumour facial disease of Tasmanian devils. A grotesque illness typified by large tumors on the face that eventually spread throughout the body, killing the animal, the problem is so rampant it threatens the species with extinction.

Like an infectious cancer, white nationalism offers mutant, bastardized forms of American ideals and institutions like liberty, states’ rights, freedom of speech, and the right to bear arms. And they prey on and amplify existing white resentment, anti-Blackness, and xenophobia. And most frustratingly, these sentiments are allowed to grow and fester because of privilege: Law enforcement never treated white domestic terrorism as aggressively as it has Black radicals or international terrorists.