Forbes:
Kai Kupferschmidt/Twitter:
NBC:
David Wallace-Wells/New York magazine (interview with Trevor Bedford, of Seattle’s Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center):
And if you can’t read or won’t read Twitter here is the Tom Frieden thread, storified.
Meanwhile:
CBC:
Dan Froomkin/Press Watch:
Roger Parloff/Lawfare explains why charging people with corrupt interference of election proceedings is a thing:
Guardian:
7 Deaths From Omicron Covid-19 Coronavirus Variant In UK, Showing It’s Not The ‘Omicold’
Well, so much for those “Omicold” claims about the Omicron variant. The Omicron variant of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) is certainly not the same as the common cold. While the jury’s still out on how virulent the Omicron variant may be, this new variant is proving that it can hospitalize and kill people, which is not what the common cold does. Today, the U.K. Health Security Agency reported that there have already been seven deaths and 85 hospitalizations related to the Omicron variant in the U.K. as of December 16.
There’s more than one way to die from Covid. If hospitals are full or understaffed, your treatable illness or emergency may not get care in time. That’s just as much a Covid-related death as the poor souls dying of misinformation in the ICU. #Covid_19 #Omicron
— Emily Landon (@emilymicheleL) December 19, 2021
Kai Kupferschmidt/Twitter:
Germany’s new expert council weighs in on #omicron: "Due to the simultaneous, extreme number of patients, a considerable overload of the hospitals is to be expected - even in the unlikely case of significantly weakened disease severity compared to the Delta variant"
They call for: - further measures to reduce contacts - enforcing current measures - intensifying vaccination and booster campaigns "all models show that booster vaccinations alone do not adequately contain the omicron wave, but that additional contact restrictions are necessary"
Beyond political decisions, "the population must be called upon to actively control infections. This includes avoiding larger gatherings, the consistent, preferred wearing of FFP2 masks [N95 equivalents], especially indoors, as well as the increased use of rapid tests at gatherings…"
#Omicron is not “milder” than Delta for unvaccinated persons: a UK analysis of 15,087 #Omicron cases found that severity of symptoms is on par with Delta variant src: https://t.co/zzBBEef3T4
— Jorge A. Caballero, MD (@DataDrivenMD) December 19, 2021
NBC:
Trump White House made 'deliberate efforts' to undermine Covid response, report says
The White House repeatedly overruled public health and testing guidance from the nation’s top infectious disease experts and silenced officials, the report found
In August of last year, for example, Trump hosted a White House meeting with people who promoted a herd immunity strategy pushed by White House special adviser Dr. Scott Atlas. The subcommittee obtained an email sent ahead of that meeting in which Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House Covid response coordinator, told the vice president’s chief of staff, Marc Short, that it was “a fringe group without grounding in epidemics, public health or on the ground common sense experience.” Birx also said in the email that she could “go out of town or whatever gives the WH cover” on the day of the meeting.
A few months later in October, National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Francis Collins called for “a quick and devastating published take down” of the herd immunity strategy, according to emails obtained and released by the subcommittee.
Good lord. He really DID tell his people to slow the testing down. https://t.co/JCrXBKtTty pic.twitter.com/Vlpz8sdivx
— S.V. Dáte (@svdate) December 18, 2021
David Wallace-Wells/New York magazine (interview with Trevor Bedford, of Seattle’s Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center):
Gauteng’s Omicron Wave Is Already Peaking. Why?
What do you think it is? The options that I have been thinking about — there’s five of them. They’re non mutually exclusive. So to go through …
Please. First, there’s the simple limit to testing capacity. As things increase, our testing capacity doesn’t increase as fast, and so we’re missing more and more cases. That can give you a distorted picture — it could look like a plateau in Gauteng, but you could imagine it’s really a much higher crest.
Like the top of a mountain has been chopped off by bad testing. I also bet we can expect a lot more underreporting of Omicron, compared to previous wave, because it’s more mild, either through existing immunity or through actual reduction of intrinsic severity. And if, on average, you’ve reduced the severity of cases, there’d be a lot of people that don’t bother to come to the hospital or to get tested. And so as a rough guess, you might go from like one in ten cases reported in South Africa to one in 20 or even one in 30 cases — that wouldn’t seem unreasonable to me. And that makes it so that at the same caseload of Delta versus Omicron you could actually have three times as many infections with Omicron.
…
Whether what we’re seeing reflects immunity or reduced severity. But in some sense, it doesn’t really matter. This is going to be less severe, either because of immunity or intrinsic severity or both. What matters much more than what drives that reduced severity is how reduced it is. People are arguing about those factors like, if it is intrinsically less severe, that means we don’t need to worry about it.
But the difference between being 30 percent less severe and 30 times less severe is really, really important. Yeah, exactly. So the scale of reduction is much more important than the mechanism.
And then two is, even if we’re not completely at endemicity, we’re pretty close. And so this may be, effectively, what endemicity looks like, and we can see how bad that feels. If we continue to have things like Omicron continuing to emerge, we can maybe expect this every year.
A tidal wave of Omicron will hit the US and other countries at the worst possible time—holidays approaching, health systems strained from Delta, flu starting, many feeling pandemic fatigue. If we get our response right, Covid won't dominate our lives in 2022. Here’s how. 1/thread
— Dr. Tom Frieden (@DrTomFrieden) December 18, 2021
And if you can’t read or won’t read Twitter here is the Tom Frieden thread, storified.
Meanwhile:
the Tuesday address got more interesting https://t.co/Wv2VWjTraU
— Greg Dworkin (@DemFromCT) December 20, 2021
CBC:
Yes, pandemic fatigue is an issue, experts say. Will Omicron make it worse?
"I think it could differ by people. Psychology is a big kind of tricky field because there's so much variation between individuals."
What makes pandemic fatigue so challenging "are all the psychological aspects to it," they said.
"Those are things that we need to be really attentive to," Harley said. "To have to hear the word 'restriction' again — that's nearly a trigger word. And we know when it comes to emotions that emotions can really get in the way of processing information and tending to information properly."
As early as May 2020, before the introduction of vaccines and just a half a year into the lockdowns, the World Health Organization (WHO) was warning that member states across Europe were reporting emerging pandemic fatigue in their populations "that poses a serious threat to efforts to control the spread of the virus."
"The perceived threat of the virus may decrease as people become used to its existence," WHO wrote in a report.
Steven Taylor, a psychiatry professor at the University of British Columbia and author of The Psychology of Pandemics, says his research has found that, while people have become increasingly distressed over 2020 and 2021, most are adhering to pandemic restrictions.
Fox anchor Martha Mac asked former CDC Director Redfield to respond to a report that the Trump admin was muzzling health officials from speaking out about COVID -- and he basically said, yup that happened H/t @AlexGuiden pic.twitter.com/8FfLWrBz6K
— Lis Power (@LisPower1) December 17, 2021
Dan Froomkin/Press Watch:
When facts have a liberal bias, New York Times editors can get squirmy
Nina Bernstein was covering homelessness for the New York Times in 1999 when then-mayor Rudolph Giuliani announced his intention to lock homeless families out of the city’s shelters for even minor rule violations.
Bernstein wrote an article about how a similar policy was working in nearby Suffolk County, leading with the story of a family of eight reduced to sleeping on a fellow church member’s linoleum floor. She reported that some families were expelled because of bureaucratic mistakes.
Simply by describing the facts, Bernstein was making Giuliani’s plan look cruel. And that created problems for her in the newsroom.
“Getting it in the paper involved overcoming lots of editor pushback,” Bernstein recalled. She and I spoke on the phone and exchanged emails.
It was a problem she ran into with some frequency: “To write factually, up close, with what I like to call intelligent compassion about these people’s lives basically invited charges of partisanship.”
Again: Moderate Dems are predicting substantive and political disaster if BBB fails. As @RepDelBene, head of New Dems, told us: “The one thing we hear from folks across all purple districts is they want to see governance work. We need to get it done.”https://t.co/YqXKE5U6gh https://t.co/eeqZigF7t7
— Greg Sargent (@ThePlumLineGS) December 19, 2021
Roger Parloff/Lawfare explains why charging people with corrupt interference of election proceedings is a thing:
Government Wins Key Ruling on Issue Affecting Hundreds of Capitol Riot Cases
On Friday, Dec. 10, the government won a key early ruling concerning a legal issue affecting hundreds of Jan. 6 Capitol Riot prosecutions.
U.S. District Judge Dabney Friedrich found that a central felony charge in a large subset of the Jan. 6 cases—“corruptly obstructing an official proceeding” —had been properly invoked and was not unconstitutionally vague. The provision has been lodged against about 270 of the more than 690 Capitol Riot defendants accused so far in federal court (about 40 percent of all cases). In many prosecutions, it is the only felony charged. Jacob Chansley, for instance—the so-called QAnon Shaman—pleaded guilty to a single charge of corruptly impeding an official proceeding. He is now appealing his 41-month sentence
…
For while Friedrich found that the accusations against Sandlin and DeGrave came within the “core” conduct that the law was designed to prevent, she acknowledged that “there may be [other] scenarios at the edges that present vagueness problems.”
That said, Friedrich’s succinct 26-page ruling does provide the government with a strong win and a well-reasoned precedent to show other judges. It employs a textualist, plain-meaning analysis that appears well crafted to appeal to conservative jurists, including the majority of the Supreme Court as currently composed. Friedrich was appointed to the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia by President Trump and previously served as an associate counsel to President George W. Bush.
As for the statutory question, Judge Friedrich had little problem finding that §1512(c)(2) applied to the facts at hand. While it was true that Sarbanes-Oxley was spurred by very different events, “statutes often reach beyond the principal evil that animated them,” she wrote.
Neil Gorsuch is in the row behind us on this flight. Tempted to say, “Excuse me, I think you’re in Merrick Garland’s seat”
— Kevin Collins (@kwcollins) December 18, 2021
Guardian:
London hospital staff speak out: ‘We’re not here to judge, but please get your Covid vaccines’
.Staff who spoke to the Observer during a visit to the Covid wards said most of these dangerously ill patients recently admitted to critical beds were unvaccinated.
Medical teams at King’s are now bracing themselves for a new influx of patients infected by the rapidly spreading Omicron variant. They are urging people to get their jabs.
Doctors and nurses say they are deeply concerned at the number of seriously ill patients being transferred to critical care beds who are still unvaccinated.
Michael Bartley, a critical care matron at King’s, estimated that “80 to 90%” in the hospital’s critical care beds were unvaccinated.
He said: “We are not here to judge patients – we are here to look after them – but this can be a scary place. If the patient is too unwell, we will take over their breathing, intubating and ventilating them.