Willful Optimism for COVID Year 5
#70 This is our fifth year of COVID. TracingCOVID is now TracingVRL.
Introduction: This is a difficult time in our culture to communicate nuance, but anecdotal evidence I gathered this year – of older people vaccinated, boosted, who’d survived previous infections months earlier told me they recovered from a COVID+ test in one day, without an antiviral – led me to see the sun shine for a bit.
Sure, a variant after JN.1, variant BA.2.87.1 with 30 spike protein mutations has already been identified, but it doesn’t appear to be spreading1.
And it’s heartbreaking how few booster shots reach the arms of people outside the U.S. Mexico experienced a COVID surge this winter that filled hospitals to capacity2. China’s population dropped after they lifted their early pandemic restrictions. Deaths jumped from “690,000 to 11.1 million, more than double last year’s increase” the Associated Press reported3. And Australia’s Department of Health and Aged Care reported a drop in booster vaccinations and a quadrupling in deaths from COVID in residential care homes, from 27 deaths at the same time last year to 108 this year4.
But it’s possibly, possibly, the beginning of the end of the panic cycle with COVID. Broad attention in my area has been shifting to baseball and women’s soccer.
My strategy remains to roll my own infectionless hybrid immunity by getting a booster shot each time the annual vaccine is designed to target a new variant. And though that Hybrid Immunity paper from 2021 always bothered me, because it didn’t count the original people who died from COVID before a vaccine was even available, maybe there is something to these “diverse memory B cells” generated after multiple and varied immunizations, which ”appear to be preemptive guesses by the immune system as to what viral variants may emerge in the future“ as the paper’s authors claimed exist5.
As treatments develop, and studies show cumulative vaccines cut the risk6, it seems prudent to remind people here and overseas that many recover from long COVID7. This knowledge might equip people with the metacognition to postpone drastic actions should they be struck with post-COVID effects9.
Since wellness climate deniers were reported10, and more journalists were laid off at the beginning of this year, and antivaxx O.G. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is on the ballot in the swing states — positioning him to spoil the election either for former President Donald Trump or current President Joe Biden — I’m arranging things to continue publishing this newsletter through the end of 2024.
Contents:
Press Vital Signs
Tribal Antivirals
‘Conspiracy Influencers’
‘The Economy Was Better in … 2020’?
Florida
Children
How to Lower Hospital Bills
Press Vital Signs
Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen had and has a vested interest in news outlets dropping their print editions, forcing news consumers online to consume news. His firm invests in internet companies which rely on digital ad impressions for revenue.
Mar 14 How print got cool again (Columbia Journalism Review) - High school journalists see paper editions as a reprieve from TikTok and information overload, as well as a route to protect privacy of sources who prefer their names be scrubbed from online articles. Schools are opting for higher-quality paper and color editions. “A lot of the schools that went to digital newspapers are realizing that nobody’s reading them,” School Publications Company CEO Kevin Kirms said.
Dec 12 2012 Andreessen denies Internet bubble, advises Times to stop printing (Reuters) - “‘It's not that you can't make money in print newspapers,’ he said. ‘It's not that there aren't people who love them.’ But successfully dealing with transformative technology requires going ‘on 100 percent offense,’ he said.”
Feb 21 2009 Andreessen in realtime (TechCrunch) - “Stop the presses tomorrow. I’ll tell you what. The stocks would go up.”
Feb 22 2023 Print ad revenue halves in six years as three tech giants make $400bn annually (Press Gazette UK) - “Global advertising revenue for publishers is forecast to decline by 7.7% this year to $47.2bn, according to a new report from intelligence provider Warc which estimated a total worldwide advertising market of $993bn. ... At the same time, the global publishing print ad market has halved since 2016, from $75.9bn.”
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