Enforced down time – In Fort Belvoir – Another guilty plea by an insurrectionist – Falling COVID rates – Rising opioid overdose rates – Suicides over the past two decades – Defeat of Governor Noem’s anti-abortion bill –Evening statistics
FIOS was down in my neighborhood yesterday for several hours. I’ve often wondered that writers for movies and TV shows do not take advantage of our increasing dependency on technology to turn out episodes along the lines of “Twilight Zone”: how our ability to communicate to others and how even our identities can depend on the mechanisms that contain personal data remaining in working order, and how much confusion can arise if they don’t. Such an episode could be called “I Hope the Electricity Works.” That would be rather a catchy title, don’t you think?
The weather yesterday was raw and chill and foggy during the morning, not the most inviting for hiking; but the mists gradually cleared and it became much warmer and drier during the afternoon. I went with RS along the trails of Fort Belvoir. A visitor pass to this military installation is surprisingly easy to obtain. I had only to show my driver’s license for identification; the staff at the Visitor Center checked it against a database and once they verified that I had no past criminal record they gave me the pass in the course of a very few minutes. The trails provide extensive views of the Accotink Bay of the Potomac. We saw numerous waterfowl flying above the water and roosting on the surface of the bay: terns (a great number of these), ducks, geese, and gulls. Just a few feet from the shore the land is chiefly wooded forest and it also was teaming with avian species: pileated woodpeckers, cardinals, and chickadees, among others. We covered about 13 miles in all. The trails are broad and for the most part well-maintained. But parts of it were slow going on account of various blowdowns caused by the recent winter storms. At one point we encountered a ranger who was inspecting the trails to determine the location of the various fallen trees and to prioritize which ones were to be cleared out first.
Aaron Mostofsky, a 35-year old from Brooklyn, was one of the rioters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6th while clad in fur as a kind of ersatz caveman costume, wearing a stolen police vest and carrying a police shield. Yesterday he pleaded guilty to one felony count of civil disorder, one count of theft of government property, and one count of entering and remaining in a restricted building. What is notable about this case is not that he entered a guilty plea to get a lesser sentence or even that he was attired for participating in the insurrection as if attending a costume party, but that he is the son of a judge in the Kings County Supreme Court of New York. The rioters, for all of their representations of themselves as spokesmen of the common man, were for the most part members of the privileged classes.
COVID cases are declining in numbers. The omicron variant gave rise to 90 million cases worldwide in the first 10 weeks of the year, a greater number than the number of cases in all of 2020. But it is receding in several countries, not excluding our own. Infections in the U.S. have decreased from an average of over 800,000 a day 2½ weeks ago to 430,000 this week. The World Health Organization has said that some countries can now consider carefully relaxing their rules if they have high immunity rates, their health care systems are strong, and the epidemiological trends are going in the right direction. England, France, Ireland, the Netherlands, and several Nordic countries have taken steps to loosen their restrictions or end them altogether. In Denmark all domestic COVID-related restrictions have been lifted entirely. The restrictions remain in effect in countries such as Austria, Germany, Italy, and Greece, where the infection rates have been declining more slowly, if at all. Even in Austria, however, the government is planning to loosen COVID-19 restrictions this month and take such steps as allowing restaurants to stay open later.
Another health issue may not be resolved so readily. The Stanford-Lancet Commission on the North American Opioid Crisis concluded that 1.2 million will die from opioid overdoses in the U.S. and Canada by 2029 and that opioid addiction will expand to other nations unless the pharmaceutical companies are somehow reined in. There were 6,306 fatal opioid overdoses in Canada and 70,168 in the United States in 2020, respectively up 72% and 37% from the year before. Part of this increase is undoubtedly a side effect of the COVID pandemic, but aggressive marketing is also a factor, possibly the chief one. It is not unprecedented for our government to step in and regulate such practices more extensively. Not long ago a similar strategy was used for tobacco companies, and the amount of smoking decreased substantially after the regulations went into effect: the rate of cigarette smoking among adults, which was 42.6% in 1965, went down to 13.7% in 2018.
Many of the opioid overdose deaths are accidental, but deliberate overdoses are on the rise within certain segments of the population. The U.S. National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) conducted a study of overdose deaths from 1999 to 2019. In that 20-year period the suicide rate as a whole has declined, but suicide by overdose increased among respectively at the following rates for males aged 15-to-24, females aged 15-to-24, males aged 75-to-84, females aged 75-to-84, and African-American women of all ages: from 0.6 deaths per 100,000 in 2015 to 0.8 in 2019, from 0.6 deaths per 100,000 in 2014 to 1.0 in 2019, from 0.7 deaths per 100,000 in 2001 to 1.6 in 2019, from 0.8 deaths per 100,000 in 2001 to 1.7 in 2019, and from 0.4 deaths per 100,000 in 2013 to 0.7 in 2017. Clearly women have been subjected to greater stress than men during the past two decades. The figure for African-American women is particularly surprising: this group has in the past been regarded as low-risk, as it tends to have strong family ties and strong religious affiliations, both of which factors generally inhibit suicide attempts. The period under which the data has been collected ends just before the beginning of the pandemic. Suicide rates during pandemics have historically been low, but the period after pandemics recede have generally shown a sharp increase, and there is every reason to suppose that the months following the decline of the COVID pandemic will conform to this pattern.
Governor Kristi Noem’s proposed abortion bill, which would have mimicked the restrictive abortion law in Texas, has failed to pass. It must be impartially recorded that the Republican Party in the South Dakota Legislature was primarily responsible for its defeat. Even the pro-lifers within the Party were antagonized by the wording of the bill, which they said would jeopardize their legal battle with Planned Parenthood. But however little credit the Party members’ motives may have been for preventing the bill to pass, they certainly succeeded in doing it, and for the moment, at least, the women of South Dakota are somewhat better situated than their counterparts to the South.
Today’s statistics as of 8:00 PM – # of cases worldwide: 381,785,205; # of deaths worldwide: 5,704,098; # of cases U.S.: 76,514,428; # of deaths; U.S.: 913,905.