The official end of the public health emergency approaches – Winding down the journal – George Santos in difficulties – The concerns of Judge Kaplan – Russian demographics – Evening statistics
The state of emergency declared over three years ago should, if all goes well, end tomorrow. As noted earlier, such an announcement constitutes a rather artificial endpoint for a pandemic; but any endpoint we devise will be artificial, more or less. Over the past several months we have been easing into a situation in which people have generally agreed to accept the disease as part of our social and medical background, just as we have for malaria, influenza, polio, and various other diseases.
As the end of the pandemic approaches there are implications for this record as well. A journal by definition does not have a well-shaped ending, like that of a novel or a biography. At one point the author simply stops, either because he decides to do so or circumstances intervene. Various events will inevitably still be unraveling at whatever point the journal ends. Consider, for example, the various loose ends that will remain at the end of this narrative. Will Donald Trump be eventually sentenced to imprisonment for his treasonous assaults on our electoral process? Will the debacle in Ukraine result in the retribution that Vladimir Putin so richly deserves? Will Fox News learn a lesson from its recent financial hemorrhage and condescend in future to perform some elemental fact-checking before making its broadcasts public? Will the Democrats come to find fault with Biden’s policy of admitting hundreds of thousands of undocumented migrants into the nation during a pandemic? Will Rudolph Giuliani obtain a bottle of hair-dye that is truly colorfast?
Answers to these and other pressing questions must be left to pens other than mine. Well over three years have elapsed since the pandemic began, and the purpose of this journal was to record the events that unrolled from the time of its inception to its closure. That purpose is, as I believe, approaching fulfillment; not without various digressions, of course. It is a personal record, not an official document, and as such is colored by the biases and the circumstances of the person who wrote it. Undoubtedly a very different journal would have been produced by someone who, for example, is not retired, or is dealing with health issues other than those created by the pandemic itself, or is coping with financial difficulties, or is less active, or is more active. I hope, indeed, that other journals are being produced in various corners of our nation, so that we will have a more comprehensive record of this time than those that pandemics generally leave behind. Who can remember, for example, how the influenza epidemic of the early 20th century affected living conditions generally for the years in which it raged? My grandparents lived through that period, but to my regret I never thought to ask them about it when I had the opportunity. The official documents of the time are mainly devoted to statistics about the mortality rate; but the manner in which it affected day-to-day living is absent from them, and such details are all but unobtainable now. I have tried to put details about activities such as shopping for groceries, performing upkeep for a residence, visiting patients at an assisted-living facility, coping with continually shifting travel restrictions, meeting with others both out of doors and within enclosed spaces, and so on. It is easy to forget the amount of time that it took to determine when it was safe to resume dining in restaurants, for instance, or attending theatrical performances, or venturing out of the country without having to worry about whether it would be possible to return to it. These concerns are not as frivolous as they might appear at first glance: such activities that fill the leisure of myself and others constitute the livelihood of many employees in this nation.
How coherent the journal may be as a whole is another matter. In Hugo’s Les Miserables, the opening chapter of Part 1, Book 3 consists of the relation of a series of incidents that occurred during the year of 1817 that seem totally unrelated to one another, while several people are mentioned as celebrated during that day, of whom some are remembered and some have been consigned to oblivion. “Napoleon was at St. Helena, and since the English would not allow him any green cloth he had his old tunics turned. Pellegrini was singing, Mlle. Bigottini was dancing, Potier was presiding at the Théâtre des Variètiés, and Mme. Saqui had succeeded Forioso on the tightrope. There were still Prussian troops in France. Legitimacy had asserted itself by cutting off first the hands and then the heads of Pleignier, Cabonneau, and Tolleron, convicted of having plotted to blow up the Tuileries.” And so on. And at the end of the chapter Hugo concludes:
“Such is a random, superficial picture of the year 1817, now largely forgotten. History discards nearly all these odds and ends and cannot do otherwise; the larger scene absorbs them. Nevertheless such details, which are wrongly called trifling – there are no trifles in the human story, no trifling leaves on the tree – are not without value. It is the lineaments of the years which form the countenance of the century.”
In the meantime odds and ends of a similar nature continue to pile up just as haphazardly while these very words are being written.
George Santos has been indicted on 13 counts, including seven counts of wire fraud, three counts of money laundering, one count of theft of public funds, and two counts of making materially false statements to the House of Representatives. He was taken into custody this morning on Long Island, was arraigned in the afternoon, and then released on bail. True pupil of Donald Trump that he is, he has refused to apologize for transgressions such as applying for unemployment benefits while earning $120,000 per year, and he has resisted all suggestions for him to resign. He is admirably qualified for a political career, that is certain.
Judge Lewis Kaplan sounded more like a worried parent allowing his teenaged children to be out on their own for the evening than a legal official when he strongly recommended the jurors of the E. Jean Carroll case not to identify themselves publicly: “not now and not for a long time.” It may sound jarring to hear a judge addressing the jurors of a case over which he has just presided in such a fashion, but no one can question his prudence in the matter. Considering Trump’s habit of directing violence, threats, and general mayhem against anyone who crosses his path, Kaplan’s concern for the safety of the jurors over the next several months seems only too well-justified.
Russia has a shortage of young men. No surprises there: casualties in the Ukrainian war have amounted to several hundred thousand; in addition, about 300,000 have fled the country. “I feel like we are a country of women now,” one Moscow resident said. “I was searching for male friends to help me move some furniture, and I realized almost all of them had left.” Russia’s central bank found in a recent survey of 14,000 employers that the country’s supply of available workers has hit its lowest level since 1998, pushing Russia into “its worst labor shortage in decades.” About 100,000 IT engineers, or 10% of the nation’s IT workforce, left Russia last year and have not returned. Russia already had a substantial gender imbalance before the war began; results from the 2021 census are expected to show that women outnumbered men by 10½ million, quite a substantial amount for a country whose population is about 143½ million. If the war continues, birth rates could go down to 1 million between mid-2023 and mid-2024, dropping the fertility rate to 1.2 children per woman, a low mark Russia hit only once, in the 1999-2000 period. A fertility rate of 2.1 is needed to keep populations stable without migration, and unlike our own favored nation, Russia possesses little attraction for migrants, even unauthorized ones.
Have patience, readers: the end is near. Hmm . . . that didn’t come out quite in the way I intended. In all seriousness, however, if the public health emergency officially ends to tomorrow, there will be a single additional entry to complete and then the journal will be done.
Today’s statistics as of 9:00 PM – # of cases worldwide: 688,049,169; # of deaths worldwide: 6,872,670; # of cases U.S.: 106,787,016; # of deaths; U.S.: 1,162,662.