Fox News immune to romance – The imprecision of the concept of herd immunity – COVID continues to wane in the U.S. – New Jersey, New York, and Connecticut plan to lift restrictions – How COVID aggravated the opioid crisis – The good results of the Nigerian response to COVID – Evening statistics
From time to time journalists indulge in a species of spitefulness that is occasionally described as “feline” – although real felines would have much more sense. Last week President Biden, while walking with his wife, bent down, plucked a dandelion from the grass, and presented it to her as a gesture of affection. Whereupon Laura Ingraham and Fox News contributor Raymond Arroyo mocked Biden for handing Jill Biden a “weed.” Clearly it hasn’t occurred to this precious pair that a plant that might appear as a weed to them is a pleasing saffron-colored flower to others. Then again, in all probability they do not consider anything that is not especially ordered from a florist’s shop to be a legitimate flower at all and that wildflowers, on the rare occasions that they bother to notice them, register in their minds simply as blurs.
Experts have recently warned that “herd immunity” to the COVID virus, in the traditional sense of the phrase, will probably not occur in this country, or anywhere else. The number of vaccinations being administered is slowing down on account of the reluctance of a certain segment of the population to receive them. In addition, the percentage of vaccinations varies from location to location. For example, even if the U.S. were to achieve a 90% vaccination rate as a whole (which is unlikely) and an isolated rural area has only 70% of its population vaccinated, the virus will accordingly make headway among the 30% who are unvaccinated. The virus is not going to go away, but it should at any rate become containable, just as influenza is. When COVID expanded during this past autumn, our hospitals were overwhelmed. At this point the number of new daily infections requiring hospitalization is relatively small and it continues to decrease.
For example, the seven-day average of daily new cases is below 50,000, the lowest figure to date since October. This figure represents a decrease of 17% from that of the previous week. Nearly 45% of Americans have received at least one dose of a vaccine, and 32% are fully vaccinated. Of those aged 18 and older, 56% are at least partially vaccinated and 40% are fully vaccinated. Biden has said that Americans may be able to celebrate the Fourth of July in the usual manner by gathering with family and friends.
New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut all plan to lift most of the COVID-related restrictions on May 19th. Curfews will no longer be in force, businesses will re-open, and offices, restaurants, museums, and theaters will no longer be subject to capacity limits, although they will need to maintain the 6-foot social distancing requirements recommended by the CDC.
Earlier in these notes I speculated whether drug addiction would increase as a result of the isolation enforced in previous months by the pandemic. Recently the CDC estimated that 90,237 people in the U.S. died of opioid overdoses between October 2019 and September 2020. The figure is the highest ever recorded since the opioid crisis began in the late 1990s. The number of American adults who reported symptoms of anxiety or depression between April 2020 and February 2021 rose by 27% over the previous year, while emergency room visits for drug overdoses increased by 36% in the same period. The figures are saddening but not surprising. It needed no gift of prophesy to foresee that stress from the pandemic, the increased number of people forced to live on their own, and the increased unemployment would create an environment in which drug addiction would flourish.
Passengers who have visited India, Turkey, or Brazil within the past 14 days will be denied entry to Nigeria as being unsafe. Nigeria, in fact, has taken effective steps against the virus from the very beginning. At this point it has a case rate of 785 per million of its population and a mortality rate of 10 per million, an extraordinarily low number for a country with nearly two-thirds as populous as the United States and one with a health care system much less developed. The recent campaign against polio has assisted them; the facilities that were developed to vaccinate the population against polio were reused once vaccines for COVID became available.
Today’s statistics as of 8:00 PM – # of cases worldwide: 154,165,915; # of deaths worldwide: 3,226,589; # of cases U.S.: 33,229,108; # of deaths; U.S.: 591,514.