Health Advisories

[jo]

Very sobering outlook for the USA as winter comes --

www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/nation-could-see-a-very-deadly-december-with-tens-of-thousands-of-coronavirus-deaths-to-come-model-predicts/ar-BB18Vrcz?ocid=msedgdhp

A possible scenario sees 415,090 Covid-19 deaths by January, the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington says in its latest forecast. The worst-case scenario is 600,000 deaths by January 1.


"When we look ahead into the winter with seasonality kicking in, people becoming clearly less vigilant, you know mask use is down, mobility is up in the nation, you put all those together and we look like we're going to have a very deadly December ahead of us in terms of toll of coronavirus," IHME director Dr. Christopher Murray told CNN's Anderson Cooper.

The trend on mask-wearing is surprising, although there were quite a few negative responses to Hugh's 9/11 tweet re Hugh's wearing a mask.

Here in our country - we have actually been asked to wear a face shield on top of the mask when in public transport or in busy places ( like malls, supermarkets, etc). It is not an issue ... and one can get apprehended if one is not wearing facemasks.

Jo

[jo]

One of the leading vaccine developers has resumed its clinical trials, after pausing to assess the impact on 1 particular volunteer.

www.msn.com/en-us/health/medical/oxford-astrazeneca-to-resume-coronavirus-vaccine-trial/ar-BB18Y9zP?ocid=msedgdhp

[jo]

More diverse and larger volunteer population are being recommended by lead vaccine developers, to encompass other illnesses that have been experienced.

www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/pfizer-proposes-expansion-of-late-stage-coronavirus-vaccine-trial/ar-BB18XYeh?ocid=msedgdhp

Jo

[jo]

Promising developments from Pfizer on vaccine development at their end --


www.msn.com/en-us/health/medical/pfizer-covid-vaccine-trial-reports-no-major-safety-issues/ar-BB194w77?ocid=msedgdhp

[jo]

A good guide on different ways of being exposed to the virus, in various scenarios/places -- with the corresponding threat ratings.


www.eatthis.com/covid-19-high-risk-places/?utm_source=msn&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=msn-feed

[jo]

It looks like bread-making or baking has become a major stress-relief activity in this time of the pandemic.

Why? Check this out

You,too, Master Baker Hugh


www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/the-psychology-of-stress-baking-why-so-many-are-making-bread-in-2020/ar-BB1aCpFD?ocid=Peregrine

[jo]

He moved the image and message to Instagram Stories!

http://instagram.com/p/CHIQt0wD3A0

[jo]

The Year of Blur

How isolation, monotony and chronic stress are destroying our sense of time.

The New York Times

Alex Williams
By Alex Williams
Oct. 31, 2020

For Kate Baer, a poet in Harrisburg, Pa., 2020 feels like a time warp. She compared it to when she and four friends escaped to a woodsy cabin in Maryland and tried cannabis edibles. “Time stopped,” Ms. Baer, 35, said. “And this is how time feels in this pandemic. Fluid and very confusing.”

Avi Bonnerjee, 34, a tech analyst from Brooklyn, said that 2020 recalls the “ambient sense of timelessness” of Los Angeles. “In New York, each season has such a distinct character, there’s always a passive sense of forward progression,” he said. “In L.A., you’re in a perpetual state of warm weather, so you seem to hang in some sort of purgatorial state.”

To Dulci Edge, 34, a consulting creative director in fashion in San Francisco, 2020 reminds her of the old parenting adage: “The days are long, but the years are short.” Except in the pandemic, she said, “the days are long, and the year is also long.



Do you feel like time has no boundaries anymore, that the days just bleed into weeks, that January may as well have been 2017?


You’re not alone if you feel that 2020, perhaps the most dramatic and memorable year of our lifetimes — and that’s before Election Day — seems shuffled and disordered, like a giant blur. A dream state, or perhaps a nightmare.


That’s the paradox of 2020, or one of them: A year so momentous also feels, in a way, as if nothing happened at all.

It’s not entirely an illusion. Without the usual work mixers, festive holiday celebrations, far-flung vacations or casual dinners that typically mark and divide the calendar, the brain has a harder time processing and cataloging memories, psychologists say, and the stress of the year itself can shift how our brains experience time.

What month did Kobe Bryant die? Was it actually this year that Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan, de-royaled themselves? Wasn’t there something about murder hornets, or was that 2018?


Are we unable to remember this awful year, or simply unwilling?


‘It’s All the Same’
For some who have recovered from Covid-19, there is a medical explanation for the feeling of mental haziness: Covid brain fog, a lingering combination of dementia-like symptoms including memory loss, confusion and difficulty focusing.

What about everyone else? For many, the year has been a monumentally odd mix of crisis, either experienced personally or witnessed in the news, and boredom. And for many of us, life in the age of lockdown consists of seeking out novel ways to escape isolation while not bingeing too heavily on the tragedy in the headlines.

Alcohol consumption is up by 14 percent (and 17 percent for women) compared with a year ago, according to recent report in the JAMA Network Open. Makers of cannabis vape pens and cartridges are reportedly seeing booming sales in states where marijuana is legal.

But maybe the sense of jumbled chronology is not just in our heads — or rather, it actually is. Sheer monotony has the ability to warp time and tangle our memories, psychologists say, with quarantines and lockdowns robbing us of the “boundary events” that normally divide the days, like chapters in a book.

Without breaks in a repetitive routine, the mind has difficulty differentiating between memories, which psychologists call pattern separation, said Lucy Cheke, a psychologist and lecturer at Cambridge University who is researching the effects of the pandemic on memory.



That might explain why Ms. Edge, the creative director from San Francisco, can’t tell what day it is sometimes.

“The usual time markers are gone, so everything is bleeding together into one amorphous blob of days,” she said. “It just keeps going and going in a way that reminds me of my teenage years. Like, high school was four years long, but it might as well have been 40. I remember feeling like I was watching paint dry, just kind of going through the motions until graduation day when my real life could begin.”

It doesn’t help that so much of our lives are virtual now, happening only on screens. Instead of stimulating our senses in real life — going to shops, meeting friends for coffee, chatting with colleagues in the office — we FaceTime when the mood strikes, we binge Netflix shows from three years ago and we browse Amazon perpetually. We lose that sense of grounding, in place and time.

“Normally, there’s a good deal of variety in our lives, so this makes that process a lot easier,” Dr. Cheke said. “If you had lunch at your desk at work on Monday, that makes it easy to distinguish from eating in a cafe on Tuesday.”

It all adds up to the blur. Does anything change?

Last spring, Ashley C. Ford, a writer in Indianapolis, packed away her sweaters and winter coats, wondering what the world might look like half a year later when she finally unpacked them.



“I took them out two weeks ago,” Ms. Ford, 33, said, “and it’s all the same.”


I
Too Much to Process Mentally
If one problem is that there is too little going on in our lives, another problem, it seems, is that there is also too much.



A remarkable thing about this year is that it’s marked not by one big crisis alone, but a giant stack of them: a killer virus blended with political chaos, environmental catastrophe, racial strife. The list goes on.

It is a “cascading series of events that just doesn’t seem to stop,” said Alison Holman, a professor of nursing and psychological science at University of California, Irvine, who studies the psychological effects of shared crises, including the current pandemic.

The unending sense of crisis is an “ongoing, chronic stressor” that can lead to a collapse of the reassuring sense that our lives move in orderly fashion: past, present, future, which is key to mental stability. Instead, many of us feel stuck in a lousy present with little sense of the future.

In researching the psychological repercussions of devastating Southern California wildfires in the 1990s, Dr. Holman said that victims felt like “time slowed down" and “the days blurred together.” “Their sense of reality changes,” she said. “They’re not sure what’s real anymore. They feel a sense of a blur, like time is just a blur.”

[jo]

[jo]

[jo]

Worldwide rejoicing over the news about the frontrunner vaccine ( which has been said to be more than 90 % effective) by Pfizer and its partnership with BioNTech.

Is this the beginning of the end of our lifetime's most dreaded disease?



Here is an article on the 2 scientists ( a husband and wife team) who headed the discovery of the Pfizer vaccine --

www.nytimes.com/2020/11/10/business/biontech-covid-vaccine.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage

Dr. Ugur Sahin, left, and Dr. Özlem Türeci, the couple who founded BioNTech.Credit...Felix Schmitt/Contact Press Images-Focus
The Husband-and-Wife Team Behind the Leading Vaccine to Solve Covid-19
The German company BioNTech, founded by two scientists, has teamed up with Pfizer on a vaccine that was found to be more than 90 percent effective.

Dr. Ugur Sahin, left, and Dr. Özlem Türeci, the couple who founded BioNTech.Credit...Felix Schmitt/Contact Press Images-Focus

David Gelles
By David Gelles
Nov. 10, 2020
Updated 3:20 p.m. ET

Two years ago, Dr. Ugur Sahin took the stage at a conference in Berlin and made a bold prediction. Speaking to a roomful of infectious disease experts, he said his company might be able to use its so-called messenger RNA technology to rapidly develop a vaccine in the event of a global pandemic.

At the time, Dr. Sahin and his company, BioNTech, were little known outside the small world of European biotechnology start-ups. BioNTech, which Dr. Sahin founded with his wife, Dr. Özlem Türeci, was mostly focused on cancer treatments. It had never brought a product to market. Covid-19 did not yet exist.

But his words proved prophetic.

On Monday, BioNTech and Pfizer announced that a vaccine for the coronavirus developed by Dr. Sahin and his team was more than 90 percent effective in preventing the disease among trial volunteers who had no evidence of having previously been infected. The stunning results vaulted BioNTech and Pfizer to the front of the race to find a cure for a disease that has killed more than 1.2 million people worldwide.

“It could be the beginning of the end of the Covid era,” Dr. Sahin said in an interview on Tuesday.

BioNTech began work on the vaccine in January, after Dr. Sahin read an article in the medical journal The Lancet that left him convinced that the coronavirus, at the time spreading quickly in parts of China, would explode into a full-blown pandemic. Scientists at the company, based in Mainz, Germany, canceled vacations and set to work on what they called Project Lightspeed.



“There are not too many companies on the planet which have the capacity and the competence to do it so fast as we can do it,” Dr. Sahin said in an interview last month. “So it felt not like an opportunity, but a duty to do it, because I realized we could be among the first coming up with a vaccine.”

After BioNTech had identified several promising vaccine candidates, Dr. Sahin concluded that the company would need help to rapidly test them, win approval from regulators and bring the best candidate to market. BioNTech and Pfizer had been working together on a flu vaccine since 2018, and in March, they agreed to collaborate on a coronavirus vaccine.


Since then, Dr. Sahin, who is Turkish, has developed a friendship with Albert Bourla, the Greek chief executive of Pfizer. The pair said in recent interviews that they had bonded over their shared backgrounds as scientists and immigrants.

“We realized that he is from Greece, and that I’m from Turkey,” Dr. Sahin said, without mentioning their native countries’ long-running antagonism. “It was very personal from the very beginning.”


ImageDr. Sahin is the chief executive of BioNTech.
Dr. Sahin is the chief executive of BioNTech.Credit...Felix Schmitt/Contact Press Images


Dr. Sahin, 55, was born in Iskenderun, Turkey. When he was 4, his family moved to Cologne, Germany, where his parents worked at a Ford factory. He grew up wanting to be a doctor, and became a physician at the University of Cologne. In 1993, he earned a doctorate from the university for his work on immunotherapy in tumor cells.


Early in his career, he met Dr. Türeci. She had early hopes to become a nun and ultimately wound up studying medicine. Dr. Türeci, now 53 and the chief medical officer of BioNTech, was born in Germany, the daughter of a Turkish physician who immigrated from Istanbul. On the day they were married, Dr. Sahin and Dr. Türeci returned to the lab after the ceremony.

The pair were initially focused on research and teaching, including at the University of Zurich, where Dr. Sahin worked in the lab of Rolf Zinkernagel, who won the 1996 Nobel Prize in medicine.

In 2001, Dr. Sahin and Dr. Türeci founded Ganymed Pharmaceuticals, which developed drugs to treat cancer using monoclonal antibodies.

After several years they founded BioNTech as well, looking to use a wider range of technologies, including messenger RNA, to treat cancer. “We want to build a large European pharmaceutical company,” Dr. Sahin said in an interview with the Wiesbaden Courier, a local paper.

Even before the pandemic, BioNTech was gaining momentum. The company raised hundreds of millions of dollars and now has more than 1,800 people on staff, with offices in Berlin, other German cities and Cambridge, Mass. In 2018, it began its partnership with Pfizer. Last year, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation invested $55 million to fund its work treating H.I.V. and tuberculosis. Also in 2019, Dr. Sahin was awarded the Mustafa Prize, a biennial Iranian prize for Muslims in science and technology.




Dr. Sahin and Dr. Türeci sold Ganymed for $1.4 billion in 2016. Last year, BioNTech sold shares to the public; in recent months, its market value has soared past $21 billion, making the couple among the richest in Germany.

The two billionaires live with their teenage daughter in a modest apartment near their office. They ride bicycles to work. They do not own a car.

“Ugur is a very, very unique individual,” Mr. Bourla, Pfizer’s chief executive, said in the interview last month. “He cares only about science. Discussing business is not his cup of tea. He doesn’t like it at all. He’s a scientist and a man of principles. I trust him 100 percent.”


In Germany, where immigration continues to be a fractious issue, the success of two scientists of Turkish descent was cause for celebration.

“With this couple, Germany has a shining example of successful integration,” wrote the conservative-business site Focus.

A member of Parliament, Johannes Vogel, wrote on Twitter that if it was up to the far-right Alternative for Germany party, “there would be no #BioNTech of Germany with Özlem Türeci & Ugur Sahin at the to

“If it were up to critics of capitalism and globalization,” he added, “there would be no cooperation with Pfizer. But that makes us strong: immigration country, market economy & open society!”

Dr. Sahin has had little time for politics this year. BioNTech has been so busy developing a vaccine that the company has not finalized the financial details of its partnership agreement with Pfizer.

“Trust and personal relationship is so important in such business, because everything is going so fast,” Dr. Sahin said. “We still have a term sheet and not yet a final contract on many things.”

[jo]

[jo]

This is a very poignant meditation by a grandma as she faces a lonely Thanksgiving

But worth reading as sympathy for her loneliness echoes with all of us --

Wherever we are in the world


www.nytimes.com/2020/11/19/opinion/sunday/covid-holiday-travel.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage

Gram, Are You Sad?’

This Year, We’re Spending the Holidays Alone
None of our grandchildren will be at our table for Thanksgiving or Christmas. But the pandemic winter still leaves room for the imagination.


By Peggy Wehmeyer
Ms. Wehmeyer is a former correspondent for ABC’s “World News Tonight.”

Nov. 19, 2020


As Covid cases in my city climb to record levels and county officials warn the vulnerable among us to shelter in place, I feel as if I’m living in the cursed kingdom of Narnia, in C.S. Lewis’s children’s fantasy, “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.” In Narnia, it’s “always winter and never Christmas.”

Like Americans everywhere, my family and friends have begun planning for the holidays. Some will ignore the Covid curse in our midst and gather anyway. My husband and I are battening down for a long winter.

When my three-year-old granddaughter recently came over to play, I blocked the door she usually enters into the house. “Sorry, Eliza,” I said, stooping to her eye level, “We have to play outside from now on.”

She looked stunned.

“Why, Gram?” she said. “Are there germs in there?”

“Germs,” in our family, is code for Covid. They are what make the places our grandchildren know and love, like Pops’ and Gram’s house, off limits.



I’d already pulled Eliza’s “Frozen” dollhouse out of the playroom and set it up on the back porch. She put the tiny pieces of furniture in the castle where they belong, but left the two sisters on the outside.

“Why don’t you put Elsa and Anna in their home?” I asked.

“They can’t EVER go in!” she said adamantly. “It’s not safe!”



Is this my grandchildren’s world now? A place where even their grandparent’s home isn’t safe? Will they look back at holiday photos and wonder why Gram and Pops weren’t there?

This Thanksgiving and Christmas, for the first time in our lives, none of our 10 children and grandchildren will be at our table.

When the pandemic began, we tried to form Covid bubbles, where groups of us followed enough safety rules to continue doing life up close.



But our secure little pods developed leaks whenever our adult children had responsibilities that exposed them to risk. A daughter who’s a lawyer spent days in hearings at the courthouse where someone was infected. Eliza’s mom, a pastor, is back at church, singing with her congregation. One son, who’s an EMT, now swabs suspected Covid patients at an urgent care center.


Now, as I string Thanksgiving garlands across the mantle and pull the straw pilgrims out of their boxes, I face the depressing reality that no one else will be in our home for the holidays. By Thanksgiving, our Covid bubble will have popped.

Even when it worked, when small pods of us had our groceries delivered and worked from home, the waltzing in and out of each other’s bubbles created stress. When does a leak require a confession?

“Your nanny goes to the college with the Covid outbreak?”

“Are you wiping down your groceries, Mom?”

“Your husband is meeting clients in person?”



Someone tumbles out of the bubble, and suddenly, icy walls separate family members. You’re in and then you’re out.

We all want off the Covid-coaster we’ve been riding: dropping our guard when cases slide into the yellow zone, upping our vigilance when infections rocket back into the red zone, where they are now.

I posted the color-coded risk scale on my refrigerator, so that when I’m tempted to meet with friends or hug a grandchild, I can rehearse the latest warnings:

No restaurants, haircuts, manicures or teeth cleanings. And now … no holiday gatherings.

Few people in my circle follow Anthony Fauci’s guidelines or CDC recommendations. It’s made me wonder, “Am I the one who’s crazy?” Or have we so blurred the lines between fantasy and reality that some of us have forgotten that Narnia is cursed … that Thanksgiving and Christmas in a pandemic spell disaster.



“Come meet us outdoors at the restaurant for dinner,” several close friends texted me weeks ago, the day our community moved back into the red zone.

“We’re not supposed to be meeting now,” I typed into the group chat. How would we all sit six feet apart at a dinner table?

“Don’t be so extreme,” a friend texted. “You’re missing out on so much of life.”

When it comes to grandchildren, almost all of my friends ignore the warnings.

“No way I’m going to live in fear and isolation and miss out on the joy of being with my grandchildren,” one close friend with six of them said.

My friends and extended family may be right. I am missing out on joy and I’m probably the most isolated in my little world. But when I catch even the mildest respiratory virus, I develop asthma, so I probably fear Covid more than most.

Wrestling with both the virus and a contentious election season has left me in a state of low-grade anxiety and righteous indignation.

As Eliza’s mother strapped her into the car seat to drive home after one of our awkward backyard visits, my granddaughter looked at me and said, “Gram, are you sad?”



I thought I’d hidden those feelings.

“Yes, I’m sad,” I said.

“It’s gonna be all right,” she reassured me. “When the germs go away, we’ll be together again.”

When Eliza’s old enough, I’ll tell her how the curse in the magical land of Narnia was eventually broken.

Aslan did it. Eliza’s seen his portrait hanging in my library. Aslan is the powerful lion C.S. Lewis created to fight the curse and make the world safe again.

The Narnia allegory sprang from Lewis’s own childhood struggles with loneliness and despair. Lewis credits his faith with restoring his hope. Aslan is the Christ figure in the chronicles.

While we’re waiting for a vaccine to reach us and end the Covid curse cast on our land, I’ll take shelter from the cold of winter by writing daily in the gratitude journal I started in March during the first lockdown. And I’ll hold onto the hope my own faith provides that even if there’s no Christmas this year, there will be an end to this long winter.

[jo]

I did chance on a TV screening of 2 NARNIA movies...so I could appreciate the references in the above essay.

In Narnia, it’s “always winter and never Christmas.”

Hopefully, next Christmas (2021) will come to our pandemic Narnia

Hugh will be there to cheer us up in THE MUSIC MAN


Jo

[jo]

From The NYTimes --

Opinion
When Will We Throw Our Masks Away? I Asked Dr. Fauci

In a new interview, he tells us how to survive the coming months, and confesses how stunned he is when people still insist the virus is “fake news.”

Elisabeth Rosenthal
By Elisabeth Rosenthal
Contributing Opinion Writer

Nov. 19, 2020


As a health journalist, a physician and a former foreign correspondent who lived through SARS in Beijing, I often get questions from friends, colleagues and people I don’t even know about how to live during our current pandemic. Do I think it’s safe to plan a real wedding next June? Would I send my kids to school, with appropriate precautions? When will I trust a vaccine?

To the last question I always answer: When I see Tony Fauci take one.

Like many Americans, I take my signals from Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the country’s top infectious disease expert and a member of the White House task force on the coronavirus. When he told The Washington Post that he was not wiping down packages but just letting them sit for a couple of days, I started doing the same. In October he remarked that he was bringing shopping bags into the house. He just washes his hands after unpacking them. (Me too!)

Now we are in a dangerous political transition, with cases spiking in much of the country and Dr. Fauci and the original task force largely sidelined. President-elect Joe Biden has appointed his own, but it can’t do much until the General Services Administration signals that it accepts the results of the election. And Dr. Fauci told me he has not yet spoken with the Biden task force. President Trump has resisted the norms on transition in which the old and new teams brief each other and coordinate.

The past tumultuous months have been filled with information gaps (we’re still learning about the novel coronavirus), misinformation (often from the president) and a host of “experts” — public health folks, mathematical modelers, cardiologists and emergency room doctors like me — offering opinions on TV. But all this time, the person I’ve most wanted to hear from is Dr. Fauci. He’s a straight shooter, with no conflicts of interest — political or financial — or, at 79, career ambition. He has no interests, other than yours and mine.




So I asked him how Americans might expect to live in the next six to nine months. How should we behave? And what should the next administration do? Some answers have been edited for clarity and brevity.

Are there two or three things you think a Biden administration should do on Day 1?

There were some states in some regions of the country that somehow didn’t seem to have learned the lessons that could have been learned or should have been learned when New York City and other big cities got hit. And that is to do some fundamental public health measures. I want to really be explicit about this, because whenever I talk about simple things like uniform wearing of masks, keeping physical distance, avoiding crowds (particularly indoors), doing things outdoors to the extent possible with the weather, and washing hands frequently, that doesn’t mean shutting down the country. You can still have a considerable amount of leeway for business, for economic recovery, if you just do those simple things. But what we’re seeing, unfortunately, is a very disparate response to that. And that inevitably leads to the kind of surges that we see now.



Do you think we need a national policy like a national mask mandate? The current administration has left a lot of Covid-19 management to the states.

I think that there should be universal wearing of masks. If we can accomplish that with local mayors, governors, local authorities, fine. If not, we should seriously consider national. The only reason that I shy away from making a strong recommendation in that regard is that things that come from the national level down generally engender a bit of pushback from an already reluctant populace that doesn’t like to be told what to do. So you might wind up having the countereffect of people pushing back even more.


Many places that have mask mandates have had trouble enforcing them.

That’s really one of the reasons there’s a reticence on the part of many people, including myself, [to support a national mandate]. If you have a mandate, you have to enforce it. And hopefully we can convince people when they see what is going on in the country. But I have to tell you, Elisabeth, I was stunned by the fact that in certain areas of the country, even though the devastation of the outbreak is clear, some people are still saying it’s fake news. That is a very difficult thing to get over. Why people still insist that something that’s staring you right in the face is not real.


People often think of shutdowns as binary. You’re open or you’re shut. Often, when you answer questions about how to live, you start with, ‘Well, I’m in a high-risk group….” So I would love to hear Dr. Fauci’s hierarchy of “Safe and important to keep open with precautions” and “Things that aren’t safe under any circumstances.”


The reason I answer with some degree of trepidation is because the people who are the proprietors of these businesses start getting very, very upset with me. There are some essential businesses that you want to keep open. You want to keep grocery stores open, supermarkets open, things that people need for their subsistence. You might, if it’s done properly, keep open some nonessential businesses, you know, things like clothing stores, department stores.


We’re heading into the winter months. You could social distance in a restaurant or in an indoor gathering. But would you feel OK being in there without a mask?

If we’re in the hot zone the way we are now, where there’s so many infections around, I would feel quite uncomfortable even being in a restaurant. And particularly if it was at full capacity.


I see you’ve been getting your hair cut. What do you think about hair salons?

I mean, again, it depends. I used to get a haircut every five weeks. I get a haircut every 12 weeks now. With a mask on me as well as a mask on the person who’s cutting the hair, for sure.


Transportation? Trains? Planes? Metro? Where are we at the moment?

It depends on your individual circumstances. If you are someone who is in the highest risk category, as best as possible, don’t travel anywhere. Or if you go someplace, you have a car, you’re in your car by yourself, not getting on a crowded subway, not getting on a crowded bus, or even flying in an airplane. If you’re a 25-year-old who has no underlying conditions, that’s much different.


Bars?

Bars are really problematic. I have to tell you, if you look at some of the outbreaks that we’ve seen, it’s when people go into bars, crowded bars. You know, I used to go to a bar. I used to like to sit at a bar and grab a hamburger and a beer. But when you’re at a bar, people are leaning over your shoulder to get a drink, people next to each other like this. It’s kind of fun because it’s social, but it’s not fun when this virus is in the air. So I would think that if there’s anything you want to clamp down on for the time being, it’s bars.



Some airlines and some states are telling people you have to get a coronavirus test before you get on the plane or visit another state. Does that make sense medically?

If you’re negative when you get on the plane — except in the rare circumstance that you’re in that little incubation window before you turn positive — that’s a good thing.


If you had a national plan for testing, what would it be?

Surveillance testing. Literally flooding the system with tests. Getting a home test that you could do yourself, that’s highly sensitive and highly specific. And you know why that would be terrific? Because if you decided that you wanted to have a small gathering with your mother-in-law and father-in-law and a couple of children, and you had a test right there. It isn’t 100 percent. Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. But the risk that you have, if everyone is tested before you get together to sit down for dinner, dramatically decreases. It might not ever be zero but, you know, we don’t live in a completely risk-free society.



There are a number of vaccine candidates that are promising. But there’s also a lot of skepticism because we’ve seen the F.D.A. come under both commercial and, increasingly, political pressure. When will we know it’s OK to take a vaccine? And which?

It’s pretty easy when you have vaccines that are 95 percent effective. Can’t get much better than that. I think what people need to appreciate — and that’s why I have said it like maybe 100 times in the last week or two — is the process by which a decision is made. The company looks at the data. I look at the data. Then the company puts the data to the F.D.A. The F.D.A. will make the decision to do an emergency use authorization or a license application approval. And they have career scientists who are really independent. They’re not beholden to anybody. Then there’s another independent group, the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee. The F.D.A. commissioner has vowed publicly that he will go according to the opinion of the career scientists and the advisory board.


You feel the career scientists will have the final say?

Yes, yes.


And will the decisions that are being made in this transition period — like the vaccine distribution plan — in any way limit the options of a new administration?

No, I don’t think so. I think a new administration will have the choice of doing what they feel. But I can tell you what’s going to happen, regardless of the transition or not, is that we have people totally committed to doing it right that are going to be involved in this. So I have confidence in that.



When do you think we’ll all be able to throw our masks away?

I think that we’re going to have some degree of public health measures together with the vaccine for a considerable period of time. But we’ll start approaching normal — if the overwhelming majority of people take the vaccine — as we get into the third or fourth quarter [of 2021].

[jo]

How To Build a Better Post-Pandemic New York City

Permanent outdoor dining is a no-brainer, but the city could do so much more.

By The Editorial Board
The editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values. It is separate from the newsroom.

Nov. 30, 2020, 5:00 a.m. ET


It took a pandemic, but New York City is seeing more clearly than ever that its roadways can do more than move cars and trucks.

Restaurants transformed parking spaces into outdoor dining rooms festooned with lights and plants.

Children reclaimed the city’s side streets, playing catch on the asphalt.

Peaceful protesters flooded the streets with cries for justice in the police killings of Black Americans.



In a year with so little solace, New York’s streetscape has brought steady relief. It’s just one example of the many opportunities before the city in the months and years ahead to reimagine how its residents can live, work, play and get around town.

One solid step would be making expansive outdoor dining a permanent fixture of New York life. But there are more urgent tasks — such as protecting pedestrians and cyclists from vehicles. After years of progress, pedestrian and cyclist deaths rose to 126 in 2019, from 105 in 2018, and are on track this year to be only slightly lower. Overall traffic fatalities are up to 218 this year, from 191 in 2019, according to city data. City officials said vehicle registrations are up, and the city has seen more reckless driving during the pandemic.

Also vital is improving air quality in low-income communities that are plagued by high asthma rates, like the Bronx, where residents have died of Covid-19 at far higher rates than the city as a whole. “We have smog in peoples’ backyards,” said Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, whose district includes large swaths of the Bronx. “If you drive 40 minutes upstate, it’s almost shocking what fresh air feels like. In some communities you just think it’s normal that the air is just kind of heavier.”

Righting this injustice means having fewer and more efficient vehicles on the road. The city’s plan to transition to electric buses by 2040 can happen sooner, and should begin in these neighborhoods. New York can also look toward building an electric fleet of sanitation trucks as that technology improves. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said the next mayor — Bill de Blasio’s term is up next year — should reassess any tax cuts to companies and industries that bring heavy pollution with them. The city can improve the air quality in these communities even further by bringing back and significantly expanding a borough-based composting system to reduce waste that is inevitably diverted through transfer stations in the South Bronx, a shift that can also bring jobs to New Yorkers who need them.


New York’s mayor and congressional representatives need to fight hard in Washington for the infrastructure dollars the city needs. That’s the only way the city can reinvest in its aging subway system, harden critical regional infrastructure and expand its bus network to areas of the city that are less accessible, like eastern Queens. Coaxing people out of their cars demands that these efforts succeed.

Other changes need to be made to the roadways themselves. The city should move faster to build a thoroughly interconnected network of protected bike lanes. It also needs pedestrian and cyclist islands at dangerous intersections. More dedicated bus lanes and car-free avenues, like 14th Street in Manhattan, may help.

A few small ideas: How about making New York’s notorious trash problem part of the solution? Instead of letting those stinky piles of refuse pile up at the curb, why not put the city’s trash into critter-proof enclosures placed between cyclists and cars? They could even have flower beds on top.

The next mayor should feel free to get creative.

Mitchell Moss, director of the Rudin Center for Transportation at New York University, said the key is to invest in public space in general. The city has some 1,700 parks and playgrounds, upon which New Yorkers have relied heavily during the pandemic. “We have to use our assets,” Mr. Moss said. He added that the city would be smart to focus more resources in the outer-boroughs, which teemed with life even as large swaths of Manhattan emptied earlier this year. “The people who didn’t leave this city have found a way to make this city more livable,” he said.

With New York City facing a budget crisis, some changes will be difficult, or may take longer than they should. Change is generally difficult in New York, home to a political class that tends toward calcification.

But amid unthinkable loss and suffering this year, lessons have been learned. Embracing those lessons is in some ways the greatest challenge facing New York, an old, proud city ready to be born anew.

I shared these thoughts --

JosieB
Philippines2h ago

One of the pocket parks that I enjoy revisiting when I am in NYC is the Paley Park (East53rd) before or after going back to busy Fifth Avenue. Quiet place where one can even have a simple lunch ( are they still selling sandwiches there?) while watching and listening to the faux waterfalls glisten. I have seen a few other pocket parks in Manhattan - why not make this a communal project which can draw (weary) tourists and not just residents for a nice break?

Reply 3 Recommend

[jo]

The honor is shared with Dr. Fauci --

Time's Choice for PERSON OF THE YEAR --

And a few other honorees.

[jo]

Beautiful sunset in pandemic-stricken NYC --

but look at the solution to the restriction for indoor dining -- they converted indoor dining to outdoor dining!

You have to admire the resilience of people!


Jo


(PS : This is when I like TWITTER best - when it allows people to share beautiful and hopeful messages!)

[jo]

Evolving guidelines on priorities for the vaccination program in the USA.

From the NYTimes --

Frontline Workers and People Over 74 Should Get Shots Next, C.D.C. Panel Says

The recommendation was a compromise aimed at getting the coronavirus vaccine to the most vulnerable of two high-risk groups.

By Abby Goodnough and Jan Hoffman
Dec. 20, 2020

Striking a compromise between two high-risk population groups, a panel advising the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention voted Sunday to recommend that people age 75 and older be next in line to receive the coronavirus vaccine in the United States, along with about 30 million “frontline essential workers,” such as emergency responders, teachers and grocery store employees.

The debate about who should receive the vaccine in these early months has grown increasingly urgent as the daily tally of cases has swelled to numbers unimaginable to the general public even weeks ago. The country has already begun vaccinating health care workers, and on Monday, CVS and Walgreens are to begin a mass inoculation campaign at the nation’s nursing homes and long-term care facilities. This week roughly six million doses of the newly authorized Moderna vaccine are to start arriving at more than 3,700 locations around the country, including many smaller and rural hospitals, widening the rollout that began with Pfizer’s vaccine last week.

The panel of doctors and public health experts had previously indicated it would recommend a much broader group of Americans defined as essential workers — about 90 million people with jobs designated by a division of the Department of Homeland Security as critical to keeping society functioning — as the next priority population, and that older people who live independently should come later.

But in hours of discussion on Sunday, conducted remotely, the committee members concluded that given the limited initial supply of vaccine and the higher Covid-19 death rate among older Americans, it made more sense to allow the oldest among them to go next, along with workers whose jobs put them “at substantially higher risk of exposure” to the virus.



“I feel very strongly we do need to have that balance of saving lives and keeping our infrastructure in place,” said Dr. Helen Talbot, a member of the panel and an infectious-disease specialist at Vanderbilt University.


Other types of essential workers, such as construction and restaurant workers, would qualify for a third wave of prioritization under the panel’s recommendations. The committee members acknowledged that they couldn’t determine a timeline for that next group, because they did not know how much demand there would be for the vaccine among the earlier priority groups.

“What we are providing governors and health officials with is a framework which is supported by evidence and will address this limited supply of vaccine that we have at this time,” said Dr. Jose R. Romero, the committee’s chairman and a pediatric infectious disease specialist in Arkansas.

Together, the two groups the committee recommended be vaccinated next number about 51 million people. Federal health officials have estimated that there could be enough vaccine supply to inoculate 100 million people before the end of February, including the nation’s 21 million health care workers and three million residents of long-term care facilities. The C.D.C. reported on Sunday that more than 556,000 people had received an initial shot over the last week; both the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines require a second dose several weeks later.

The director of the C.D.C., Dr. Robert Redfield, will now review the panel’s latest recommendation and decide, likely by Monday, whether to embrace it as the agency’s official guidance to states. After the committee suggested last month that it would recommend that essential workers get vaccinated ahead of older people, Dr. Redfield urged its members in a statement to “demonstrate that we as a nation also prioritize the elderly.”



A working group of the committee suggested that in addition to teachers, firefighters and police, “frontline essential workers” should include school support staff, day care employees, corrections personnel, public transit, grocery store and postal workers, and those in working in food production and manufacturing.

But the group’s formal recommendation is not that specific. The panel, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, emphasized that its recommendations were nonbinding and that every state should fine-tune them to serve the unique needs of its population.

The 13-to-1 vote came as frustrations flared nationally about the pace of vaccine distribution. This weekend, Gen. Gustave F. Perna, who heads the Trump administration’s distribution effort, apologized for states learning at the last minute that they would receive fewer doses of the Pfizer vaccine next week than they had expected. Tensions were also roiling in some states over local decisions regarding which health care workers should get their shots immediately, and which — including hospital administrators who do not see patients, some of whom were vaccinated last week — should wait.
When the committee signaled last month that essential workers should precede adults 65 and older, many members supported that view, expressing alarm that these workers, who are often low-wage people of color, were being hit disproportionately hard by the virus and were additionally disadvantaged because of their limited access to good health care.


But when word of that proposal emerged, the public reaction was frequently harsh because many people felt that the elderly deserved protection first, as they, too, are dying at disproportionately high rates and overwhelming health care facilities.

In addition, the committee faced a flood of often vicious accusations that it was prioritizing other racial groups over white people.

In a strongly worded statement before the panel’s vote on Sunday, its chairman, Dr. Romero, pushed back. “Our attempt has been always to achieve equitable ethical and fair distribution of that resource. We have never targeted a specific ethnic nor racial group for receipt of the vaccine,” he said.

The position the committee ultimately endorsed was intended to mediate between competing and compelling concerns. The latest recommendation now trims back essential workers to a smaller category and narrows the eligible older population by a decade.

The full committee also voted to recommend a third priority group to get the vaccine after people who are older than 74 and those who are “frontline” essential workers: people ages 65 to 74 (roughly 32 million); people ages 16 to 64 with high-risk medical conditions (more than 110 million); and all other essential workers, including those with jobs in restaurants, construction, law, transportation other than public transit and water treatment.

Dr. Grace M. Lee, a committee member who is a professor of pediatrics at the Stanford University School of Medicine, noted that while the C.D.C. currently lists 11 “high-risk” conditions that make people more vulnerable to a life-threatening case of Covid-19, such as severe obesity, sickle cell disease or Type 2 diabetes, the list needs to be constantly updated as clinicians learn about more conditions that can leave patients exposed.

Later this week, the C.D.C. is expected to issue further explanations of the panel’s rationales and more guidance for doctors with high-risk patients.

Some on the committee called for refining priorities further within each large group, if only to help states and local governments make difficult decisions in the coming weeks. For example, one asked, shouldn’t older frontline essential workers go before younger ones?

The committee members said that the overarching consideration should be for those who could not do their jobs without social distancing or who did not have ready access to personal protective equipment. Those who can work remotely and otherwise don’t fall into a higher priority group, they said, should wait.

But the group also suggested that the categories would be fluid, and that states could move from one phase to the next if supply increased, if data suggested that most people in a group had gotten vaccinated, or if appointments for the shots in any given jurisdiction began to be less than 80 percent filled.


“Vaccination within the phases may and likely will overlap,” said Dr. Beth Bell, a panel member and a global health expert at the University of Washington.
One debate centered on how congregate housing, such as prisons and jails, should receive vaccination priority. The recommendation lists correctional staff as frontline essential workers but is silent about prisoners themselves, who have been at very high risk of contagion.

Ultimately, the panel suggested local health departments determine whether to vaccinate prisoners simultaneously with corrections officers based in part on whether an outbreak was flaring in their institution.

Repeatedly, members of the committee underscored the fluidity of the factors they were considering in determining their allocation priorities. There is still more to be learned about the virus and the vaccines themselves, they said, that could affect decisions further down the road.

Committee members also pointed out that their recommendations could change based on what happens with supply of and demand for the vaccine. They issued an urgent call for more federal funding to state and local health departments for distribution efforts, which they said were in grave danger of being thwarted by insufficient staffing and resources on the ground.

“Today, state and local health departments are on life support,” said Dr. Jeffrey Duchin, a panel member who is in charge of public health in Seattle and King County, Wash., which saw the nation’s first Covid-19 outbreaks in March. “We’re hamstrung and stymied by the lack of necessary federal funding to allow us to take advantage of these newly available vaccines.”

[jo]

The stark and shameful truth!


www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/rich-countries-buying-most-of-the-world-s-vaccine-supply-has-left-the-rest-scrambling-for-supplies-campaigners-say/ar-BB1cdKQi?ocid=msedgdhp

*Wealthier countries like the US and the UK have cleaned out global supplies of coronavirus vaccines, leaving many nations without access to any doses at all.

*Rich countries have reserved more doses than their populations need, while lower-income countries are relying on a UN-backed acquisition program that may struggle to deliver.

*Campaigners at large NGOs organizations told Insider that unequal vaccine access will deepen poverty and inequality, and ultimately harm rich nations too.



Rich countries' success in buying up most of the vaccine supply have left the rest of the world "scrambling for supplies" as they try to protect their populations, campaigners say.


The world's wealthiest countries have reserved enough vaccines to allow them to inject their populations multiple times over, and have started administering shots.

The oversupply is a consequence of countries buying up multiple types of vaccine before it was clear which ones would work.

If, as expected, most major candidates are approved then they will have many more than they need.

Meanwhile, poorer countries are firmly at the back of the line, and may have to wait years for mass vaccination.

Researchers and campaigners say the difference will be stark: One estimate from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health says that 51% of vaccine doses have been reserved by countries representing less than 15% of the world's population.


Roz Scourse, a policy advisor for Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors without Borders, told Insider: "I think the worst case scenario, to be blunt, is that we will continue to see people in low and middle-income countries dying of COVID for many years to come when there are effective vaccines and treatments available.

"There isn't a greater inequity, in my mind, than dying of something when you know that a treatment or a vaccine for that exists somewhere."

She said the current situation means much of the world is "scrambling for supplies."

Researchers for leading charities told Insider they fear that scenario will soon materialize.

Anna Marriott, Oxfam's health-policy manager, said countries have become "trapped in this deadly mix insufficient vaccine supply combined with inequality in ability to pay for the vaccine - with too little supply, and the supply that we have being primarily bought by rich countries."


"Now those countries have, I think, primarily through their purchasing power, have managed to jump to the front of the queue."

The warnings have been stark. Some experts warn low-income countries could have to wait years - perhaps to 2024 - before getting enough vaccines for most of their populations.

Steve Cockburn, the head of economic and social justice for Amnesty International, told Insider: "rich countries have acted quickly to buy up whatever vaccines had a chance of being produced, and their financial muscle has allowed them to preorder the majority of the world's vaccine supplies, leaving little left for other countries."


Charities including Amnesty and Oxfam have formed the People's Vaccine Alliance to campaign for more equal vaccine access.

It's warning that 67 countries will only be able to vaccinate one in 10 of their people next year, even taking into account existing efforts to spread out the vaccine supply.

And the campaigners warn these countries are already suffering.

Marriott, of Oxfam, said: "The impact of coronavirus on poorer nations has already been catastrophic. We know poverty's rising for the first time in over 20 years and hunger's rocketing.

"Unlike in developed nations, we're seeing vast numbers of people in developing countries receiving no government support or public funding to help cope with the effects of this pandemic."

The world's worst-off suffer most
Rich nations hedged their bets when buying vaccines: There was no clear indication of which vaccines would be approved or in what order.

This pushed officials to place orders with multiple vaccine makers - a situation that will leave them with an excess of doses if all the vaccines they've bought are approved.

How exactly countries like the US and UK managed to secure their supply is unclear, but wealth, as well as political factors like the vaccines being developed in those countries, played major roles.

But it is people already struggling under health and political crises that will likely find it hardest to get vaccines.

Campaigners pointed Insider to countries like Myanmar, where refugees are fleeing targeted violence in the country; and Nigeria, which is already dealing with a food crisis.


Vulnerable groups there are particularly likely to suffer, they said, including those in refugee camps or affected by armed violence.

Cockburn said that "unless urgent action is taken, the people who are most at risk could be the last to receive the vaccine."

"If rich countries continue hoarding vaccines, and pharmaceutical companies don't share their technology, these countries could be forced into even more debt and global poverty will be greatly deepened."

The system for equal access is failing
Some programs exist to equalize vaccine access. This includes Covax, the WHO-backed global effort to reach people in lower-income countries. Many countries, though not the US, have donated to it.

But it's struggling, with Reuters reporting that it is facing a lack of funds and structural issues. Internal documents say it's facing a high risk of failing in its quest to secure vaccines.

Scourse, of Doctors Without Borders, said wealthy countries are relying on Covax as a band-aid solution that lets them avoid offering further help, and to justify their own acts of self-preservation.

"That's the position we hear from the UK government all the time: Because Covax exists, there's no need to do anything else, basically."

She noted that, even if wealthy countries donate to Covax, "the money doesn't help if there's no doses to buy" because wealthy countries bought so much of what is available.

Canada has bought enough vaccines to inoculate its residents six times over, provided all those doses are approved and delivered, a New York Times analysis found.


The analysis found the US bought enough to inoculate residents four times, the EU bought enough to do it twice, and the UK bought enough to do it four times.

Canada has committed to, at some point, donating excess supply to other countries.

But Marriott said it was "abhorrent to suggest that the right to health of people in developing countries is dependent on distributing excess vaccines."

Campaigners see solutions
The campaigners say vaccine makers need to make their research public, and give up the exclusive ability to produce the vaccines.

This would allow other companies to start manufacturing the same vaccines and increasing the global supply.

They noted the vaccines were developed with public funding, and say the companies should commit to fair pricing, so more countries can afford them.

They said ensuring the rest of the world gets vaccinated is also in the direct interest of richer countries, as it would boosting global trade and manufacturing, and prevent the virus from spreading rapidly for years - which could allow it to mutate into something current vaccines do not protect against.


Marriott said: "No one is safe until everyone is safe. As long as the virus is allowed to continue in developing countries, the risk to public health in rich countries will also continue."

And to think that in some countries with potential hyper-oversupply of vaccines, a good % of the population do not even want the vaccines or are hesitant to be vaccinated. That puts the oversupply at an even higher ratio to population size.

[jo]

Heartwarming notes from a New Yorker ( who could also be someone else in another city) --

how the pandemic has changed our perspectives!


From the NYTimes --

BIG CITY

8 Things We Hated About New York Until 2020 Happened


New Yorkers are world-famous kvetchers. But when we got something real to complain about, we changed our tune.

This scene was not so common last year. But now it’s how New Yorkers are socializing and keeping restaurants from going under.

By Ginia Bellafante
Dec. 25, 2020, 5:00 a.m. ET


The arrival of the coronavirus in New York City at the end of last winter upended everything we did, thought and talked about. That friend who was always 15 minutes late to everything? Now many of us actually fantasize about sitting in a cramped bar, waiting for him.

We grew to deeply appreciate so many things we used to loathe or dismiss or identify ourselves against — things that were uncomfortable, inconvenient or offensive to certain aesthetic standards we had set for ourselves.

But we have been humbled. We have come around. Mostly. Not on everything, but at least on a few:

Street Theater
Outdoor performances show the resiliency and creativity of New Yorkers. So what if they’re blocking traffic?
Whether it was parades or buskers or street performers of some other variant, New Yorkers could find themselves annoyed when their efforts to walk 15 blocks, say, in precisely nine minutes, were interrupted by unsolicited entertainment. The coronavirus changed all that.

Now the impromptu orchestral and choral performances that turn up on sidewalks and stoops bring tearful joy — a gratitude for all the creativity and artful innovation that animates New York. Time has slowed down; interruptions are met with excitement. Most of us looked forward to the banging of pots outside windows every night in the early days. Noise, typically a nuisance, has become a sign of life and hope.


Adults Who Dress Like 8-Year-Olds
Back in the days when you used to get up every morning and go someplace, you dressed like you meant it. You were a grown-up and you were living in New York City. You had skirts, maybe some ties, a handbag or jacket you might have saved up for — probably even shoes that covered your heels (and kept the shoe repair shops in business).

But if the pandemic left you working at home, you were suddenly destinationless, and your daily uniform got cuddly enough to suggest that the only thing you were missing in your Zoom meeting was a stuffed koala. Did you even know how many different kinds of sweatpants there were in the world? Or styles of Birkenstocks? Now you can’t imagine going back.

Large Appliances Left on the Sidewalk
Fridges on the sidewalk? Now a very good thing.
It is notoriously hard to get rid of big things in New York City. So it is not uncommon to see air-conditioners, printers or old TVs on the sidewalk with signs that say “Free.”

Neighbors generally don’t love what is essentially visual pollution — a self-serving exercise in decluttering because someone just can’t wait until the day that the sanitation department picks up bulky electronics.


Early on in the pandemic, though, working refrigerators began popping up in neighborhoods around the city, offering something free that was actually needed and valuable: bread, milk, eggs, fresh produce and so on. As food insecurity has soared around the city, these community fridges became just what you hoped to see.


Plexiglass Dividers Where You Shop
Once a sign that you were in a dangerous place, the plexiglass shield is now proof that you are in a safe one.
In the 1980s and ’90s — the bad old days of the city — encountering a plexiglass divider in a store was often something that triggered anxiety and discomfort. The shields, which frequently turned up in liquor stores, signaled that you weren’t in the safest retail space — that the cashier was guarding himself from a potential spray of bullets.

When the Covid-19 crisis came along, plexiglass dividers — typically erected at the point of checkout — had the opposite effect. They were exactly what you wanted: an effort to protect workers and shoppers from an aggressive contagion.

Gray Hair
It hardly needs to be said that society has not left women to cultivate a good relationship with getting older. Gray hair is an enemy and an easy target in the war to preserve youth. For decades women have been told that if they aren’t coloring their hair they are “giving up.”

But the pandemic shut down salons for a time and generally demanded relinquishing vanity. Many women have realized that they no longer need to spend so much time and money getting their hair the right shade of caramel. Gray is beautiful and a powerful symbol that, amid so much death, aging isn’t a curse but a privilege.


Eating Outside When It Is Cold
A year ago, who would have wanted to sit outdoors at a restaurant when it was 38 degrees? Now it’s the brass ring: a table on a patio or on the sidewalk on a night when it isn’t frigid but still bracing.

The legalization of heat lamps for commercial use, dining sheds, yurts, plastic igloos and a reimagining of the streetscape have all made what feels romantic and tantalizingly European possible. Now we long to eat outside to see one another safely and keep the city’s vital restaurant industry going.

Ugly Furniture From the Set of “The Office” but in Your Apartment
Maybe you were lucky enough to figure out early on that the tasteful West Elm chair, with the small footprint, that you tucked under your rarely used desk in the bedroom wasn’t going to cut it, orthopedically speaking, for months of working from home.

So you begged forgiveness from Instagram and bought a bleak-looking office chair on Amazon. But you know what? The animosity tamed once your back started sending you thank you notes.

Drinking at 5 p.m.
Hard-driving New Yorkers do not drink at an hour many consider the afternoon. Cocktails at 5 o’clock is for Cheever stories. In New York, the custom was to knock back later. If you were drinking at 5, it was probably at 5 in the morning, when you finished your shift.

But the pandemic changed our sense of time, especially in the early days of winter and again now when the light fades so early.

Ginia Bellafante has served as a reporter, critic and, since 2011, as the Big City columnist. She began her career at The Times as a fashion critic, and has also been a television critic. She previously worked at Time magazine. @ginianyt

[jo]

From the perspective of how economic development will return given the disparity of access to vaccines between the rich and the poor countries --

www.nytimes.com/2020/12/25/business/coronavirus-vaccines-global-economy.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage

LONDON — The end of the pandemic is finally in view. So is rescue from the most traumatic global economic catastrophe since the Great Depression. As Covid vaccines enter the bloodstream, recovery has become reality.

But the benefits will be far from equally apportioned. Wealthy nations in Europe and North America have secured the bulk of limited stocks of vaccines, positioning themselves for starkly improved economic fortunes. Developing countries — home to most of humanity — are left to secure their own doses.

The lopsided distribution of vaccines appears certain to worsen a defining economic reality: The world that emerges from this terrifying chapter in history will be more unequal than ever. Poor countries will continue to be ravaged by the pandemic, forcing them to expend meager resources that are already stretched by growing debts to lenders in the United States, Europe and China.

The global economy has long been cleaved by profound disparities in wealth, education and access to vital elements like clean water, electricity and the internet. The pandemic has trained its death and destruction of livelihood on ethnic minorities, women and lower-income households. The ending is likely to add another division that could shape economic life for years, separating countries with access to vaccines from those without.

“It’s clear that developing countries, and especially poorer developing countries, are going to be excluded for some time,” said Richard Kozul-Wright, director of the division of globalization and development strategies at the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development in Geneva. “Despite the understanding that vaccines need to be seen as a global good, the provision remains largely under control of large pharmaceutical companies in the advanced economies.”

Gift Subscriptions to The Times, Cooking and Games.
Starting at $15.
International aid organizations, philanthropists and wealthy nations have coalesced around a promise to ensure that all countries gain the tools needed to fight the pandemic, like protective gear for medical teams as well as tests, therapeutics and vaccines. But they have failed to back their assurances with enough money.

The leading initiative, the Act-Accelerator Partnership — an undertaking of the World Health Organization and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation among others — has secured less than $5 billion of a targeted $38 billion.



A group of developing countries led by India and South Africa sought to increase the supply of vaccines by manufacturing their own, ideally in partnership with the pharmaceutical companies that have produced the leading versions. In a bid to secure leverage, the group has proposed that the World Trade Organization waive traditional protections on intellectual property, allowing poor countries to make affordable versions of the vaccines.


The W.TO. operates on consensus. The proposal has been blocked by the United States, Britain and the European Union, where pharmaceutical companies wield political influence. The industry argues that patent protections and the profits they derive are a requirement for the innovation that yields lifesaving medicines.

Proponents of suspending patents note that many blockbuster drugs are brought to market via government-financed research, arguing that this creates an imperative to place social good at the heart of policy.

“The question is really, ‘Is this a time to profit?’” said Mustaqeem De Gama, councilor at the South African mission to the W.T.O. in Geneva. “We have seen governments closing down economies, limiting freedoms, yet intellectual property is seen to be so sacrosanct that this cannot be touched.”



Inside a lab at Serum Institute of India in Pune. India is one of the developing countries that have sought to increase the supply of vaccines by manufacturing their own.

In the wealthy nations that have secured access to vaccines, relief from the economic disaster brought on by the public health emergency is underway. The restrictions that have shut down businesses could be lifted, bringing meaningful economic benefits as soon as March or April.


For the moment, the picture is bleak. The United States, the world’s largest economy, has suffered death tolls equivalent to a 9/11 every day, making a return to normalcy appear distant. Major economies like Britain, France and Germany are under fresh lockdowns as the virus maintains momentum.

But after contracting 4.2 percent this year, the global economy appears set to expand by 5.2 percent next year, according to Oxford Economics. That forecast assumes annual growth of 4.2 percent in the United States and a 7.8 percent expansion in China, the world’s second-largest economy, where government action has controlled the virus.


Europe will remain a laggard, given the prevalence of the virus, according to IHS Markit, with the continent’s economy not returning to its precrisis size for two years. But a deal struck between Britain and the European Union on Thursday, preserving much of their trading relationship after Brexit, has eased the worst fears about a slowdown in regional commerce.

But by 2025, the long-term economic damage from the pandemic will be twice as severe in so-called emerging markets compared with wealthy countries, according to Oxford Economics.

Such forecasts are notoriously inexact. A year ago, no one was predicting a calamitous pandemic. The variables now confronting the global economy are especially enormous.

The production of vaccines is fraught with challenges that could limit supply, while their endurance and effectiveness are not fully understood. The economic recovery will be shaped by questions of psychology. Following the most profound shock in memory, how will societies exercise their freedom to move about once the virus is tamed? Will people liberated from lockdowns pack together in movie theaters and on airplanes?

Any lingering disinclination toward human congregation is likely to limit growth in the leisure and hospitality industries, which are major employers.

The pandemic has accelerated the advance of e-commerce, leaving traditional brick-and-mortar retailers in an especially weakened state. If an enduring sense of anxiety prompts shoppers to avoid malls, that could limit job growth. Online retailers like Amazon have aggressively embraced automation, meaning that an increase in business does not necessarily translate into quality jobs.



Many economists assume that as the vaccines ease fear, people will surge toward experiences that have been off limits, thronging restaurants, sporting events and holiday destinations. Households have saved up as they have canceled vacations and entertained themselves at home.

“If people’s spirits are eased, and some of the restrictions are lifted, you could see a spending splurge,” said Ben May, a global economist at Oxford Economics in London. “A lot of this will be about the speed and degree to which people go back to more normal behaviors. That’s very hard to know.”


But many developing countries will find themselves effectively inhabiting a different planet.

The United States has secured claims on as many as 1.5 billion doses of vaccine, while the European Union has locked up nearly two billion doses — enough to vaccinate all of their citizens and then some. Many poor countries could be left waiting until 2024 to fully vaccinate their populations.

High debt burdens limit the ability of many poor countries to pay for vaccines. Private creditors have declined to take part in a debt suspension initiative championed by the Group of 20.

Promised aid from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund has proved disappointing. At the I.M.F., the Trump administration has opposed an expansion of so-called special drawing rights — the basic currency of the institution — depriving poor countries of additional resources.

“The international response to the pandemic has essentially been pitiful,” said Mr. Kozul-Wright at the U.N. trade body. “We are worried that as we move into the distribution of the vaccines, we are going to see the same again.”

Even if masses of people in poor countries do not gain access to vaccines, their economies are likely to be helped as wealthier nations return to normal. Tourists, for instance, would return to Turkey.

One element of the Act-Accelerator partnership known as Covax is meant to allow poor countries to buy vaccines at affordable prices, but it collides with the reality that production is both limited and controlled by profit-minded companies that are answerable to shareholders.

“Most people in the world live in countries where they rely on Covax for access to vaccines,” said Mark Eccleston-Turner, an expert on international law and infectious diseases at Keele University in England. “That is an extraordinary market failure. Access to vaccines is not based on need. It’s based on the ability to pay, and Covax doesn’t fix that problem.”

On Dec. 18, Covax leaders announced a deal with pharmaceutical companies aimed at providing low- and middle-income countries with nearly two billion doses of vaccines. The arrangement, which centers on vaccine candidates that have not yet gained approval, would provide enough doses to vaccinate one-fifth of the populations in 190 participating countries by the end of next year.

India is home to pharmaceutical manufacturers that are producing vaccines for multinational companies including AstraZeneca, but its population is unlikely to be fully vaccinated before 2024, according to TS Lombard, an investment research firm in London. Its economy is likely to remain vulnerable.

Even if masses of people in poor countries do not gain access to vaccines, their economies are likely to receive some spillover benefits from wealthier nations’ return to normal. In a world shaped by inequality, growth can coincide with inequity.

As consumer power resumes in North America, Europe and East Asia, that will drive demand for commodities, rejuvenating copper mines in Chile and Zambia, and lifting exports of soybeans harvested in Brazil and Argentina. Tourists will eventually return to Thailand, Indonesia and Turkey.

When consumer power resumes in North America, Europe and East Asia, that will drive demand for commodities, rejuvenating mines like the Codelco El Teniente copper mine in Chile.
When consumer power resumes in North America, Europe and East Asia, that will drive demand for commodities, rejuvenating mines like the Codelco El Teniente copper mine in Chile.Credit...Fabian Cambero/Reuters
But some argue that the ravages of the pandemic in poor countries, largely unchecked by vaccines, could limit economic fortunes globally. If the poorest countries do not gain vaccines, the global economy would surrender $153 billion a year in output, according to a recent study from the RAND Corporation.

“You need to vaccinate health care workers globally so you can reopen global markets,” said Clare Wenham, a health policy expert at the London School of Economics. “If every country in the world can say, ‘We know all our vulnerable people are vaccinated,’ then we can return to the global capitalist trading system much quicker.”

[njr]

Just getting around to telling my story now, but I tested positive for Covid on Tuesday the 5th (Rapid Test) They also did the regular test which I should get the results today or tomorrow. Started off on Dec. 28th with a cough, but it was not a dry one, then progressed to head cold. No fever or shortness of breath. By the 2nd or 3rd I lost my sense of smell so I got an appointment online for the drive-up at our nearby health department (I had gone there last May when I had a cough, but was negative) Have no idea who I got it from. The week prior to the 25th I had only been around my mom, daughter, son-in-law and their baby. Then on the 25th there were 7 adults and the baby over for Christmas-none of them are sick. At this point it's been 11 days but am waiting until Jan.12th to take care of my granddaughter again.

I just read that I might have immunity now from Covid for at least 3 months, but should still get the vaccine (I will!)

[jo]

Get well soon, Nancy!

Wishing you full recovery...and enjoying family life again!


Jo

[mamaleh]

Nancy, I hope you regain your sense of smell and taste and are back to good health. I hope your family members are OK, too. Be well.

Ellen