Coronavirus: The Wealthy to the Front of the Line for Vaccines?

The eye-catching headline in this Los Angeles Times (Dec 18) article is about one doctor being approached with a $25,000 donation/bribe offer to get the vaccine. The individuals offering those types of bribes are willing to jump ahead of doctors, nurses, and the elderly in nursing homes. I would assume most of us don't look kindly on that type of behavior. In fact, a wealthy person making such bribes has to think about their reputation. I am sure that people jumping the line that far in advance will eventually get their names leaked to the public. 

Yet, being wealthy will still have advantages when it comes to getting the vaccine: 

Some wealthy patients may get the shots sooner than the average person because they’re members of exclusive healthcare groups that offer the kind of high-quality, primary care most Americans can’t afford.

Those patients are already on waiting lists with concierge doctors who charge as much as $25,000 a year for 24-hour access to top-notch care, which includes working to get their clients vaccinated as soon as it’s available.

Coronavirus: Haiti Still Avoiding a Major Outbreak

There are certain countries that I thought would be overwhelmed with COVID-19 cases and deaths. One of those countries was Haiti, which at this point in time, I was wrong. I'm not the only person who thought that would occur, of course.

I last checked in on Haiti back in October. I figured it would be time to take another look. The Miami Herald (Dec 16) investigates this situation:

“Sincerely, I don’t have an explanation as to why,” [Dr. Sophia Cherestal Wooley, deputy medical coordinator for Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières in Port-au-Prince] said. “We cannot say that the virus isn’t in circulation and I don’t think Haiti has a different virus that’s circulating . . . ”

. . . This week, health workers on the front lines of the pandemic were warned that the country may be heading into a second wave. Not only is the country experiencing an uptick in laboratory confirmed cases, but the positivity rate has gone from almost 9 percent in November to almost 16 percent last week. The majority of the cases are coming mostly from the United States, particularly Florida, and the Dominican Republic.

. . . Even anecdotally, the country isn’t seeing the kind of death toll it saw just 10 years ago when cholera hit, and medical professionals were overwhelmed with corpses and deathly ill patients..

Coronavirus: 1 in 3 in Los Angeles are Infected with the Virus

Per the LA Times (Jan 14), 1 in 3 residents in Los Angeles County have been infected with the coronavirus. We have to remember that back in June estimates ranged between 2% to 4%. Talk about a dramatic increase in infections over the course of 8 months or so. This has to be the definition of exponential growth, which really just took off like a rocket starting in December.

At the time of this January 14th article, officially documented cases were just under 1 million. This implies that slightly less than 1 in 3 cases are verified (LA County's population is around 10 million so the estimate is that 3.3 million have already gotten infected.)

Parler is Canceled for Now

There's an argument that has gone around libertarian circles that Twitter has the absolute right to suspend / permanently ban a user. I wouldn't say I'm perfectly aligned with libertarian values, but I do feel that I lean in that direction. I was thinking to myself, "These folks can just go to Parler."  

Well, that thought didn't last long. Parler got hit from three sides recently: Google, Apple, Amazon.

Here's the timeline from what I can tell:

First, Google Play banned Parler.

CNN (Jan 8) reported: 

Google said its app store has long required that apps displaying user generated content have moderation policies in place to prevent the spread of violent rhetoric. 

"We're aware of continued posting in the Parler app that seeks to incite ongoing violence in the US," a Google spokesperson said. "We recognize that there can be reasonable debate about content policies and that it can be difficult for apps to immediately remove all violative content, but for us to distribute an app through Google Play, we do require that apps implement robust moderation for egregious content. In light of this ongoing and urgent public safety threat, we are suspending the app's listings from the Play Store until it addresses these issues."

Coronavirus: Is President Joe' Biden's 100 million Vaccine Doses in 100 Days Goal that Impressive?

When then President-elect Joe Biden announced that he was targeting 100 million COVID-19 vaccination doses in the first 100 days, the media seemed to fawn at how aggressive of a goal it was. 

Take this USA Today (Jan 14) article: 

President-elect Joe Biden wants Americans to get 100 million COVID-19 vaccine shots during the first 100 days of his administration, a lofty goal to reverse a slow start to the nation's vaccine rollout.

Biden offered few details on how his administration would achieve the ambitious timeline during a Thursday night speech on his proposed $1.9 trillion economic recovery package. He plans to share more details Friday on his vaccine plan.

"This will be one of the most challenging operational efforts we’ve ever undertaken as a nation," Biden said. "We’ll have to move heaven and earth to get more people vaccinated, to create more places for them to get vaccinated, to mobilize more medical teams to get shots in peoples’ arms."

Coronavirus: Mexico's Virgin of Guadalupe and Government

For awhile, it looked like Mexico would surge past the United States when it came to deaths per million. But then the United States started to see 3,000 deaths on certain days and has pulled far ahead of Mexico on an official basis. That doesn't mean that Mexico has succeeded in suppressing the spread of COVID-19. Here is some of the recent news out of Mexico.

Per the Los Angeles Times (Dec 12), Mexico was forced to cancel the Catholic pilgrimage to the shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe. Per the article, it is one of the world's largest religious pilgrimages.

For weeks, church and civic authorities have been urging people to stay away from the storied shrine — erected alongside the hillside where, according to Catholic teaching, Mary, the Mother of Jesus, appeared to a peasant, Juan Diego, in 1531, just a decade after the Spanish conquest. The apparition and the central artifact of veneration — an image of the Virgin that is said to have been imprinted on Juan Diego’s cloak, which is now preserved and on view at the shrine via a moveable walkway — helped solidify Catholicism among Mexico’s indigenous masses.

The New York Times (Dec 21) reported that the federal government wasn't honest about the spread of the virus in Mexico City:

In early December, the pandemic was roaring back in Mexico City . . . Despite the surge, federal officials reassured the public during a Dec. 4 briefing that Mexico City had not reached the critical level of contagion that, according to the government’s own standards, would require a full lockdown in the city, shutting down its economy.

Coronavirus: Los Angeles Response, "Let's Party"

Back to the end of 2020, Eric Feigl-Ding tweeted on how 20%-40% of front-line workers were declining the COVID-19 vaccine. Obviously, someone chimed in that those must be Trump supporters. I basically responded back in a few tweets that I didn't buy that. Part of my reasoning was all the underground parties going on in Los Angeles. Those parties just don't sound like parties that Trump supporters would attend. This is a topic I've done at least some research on. Back on Dec 5th I wrote a blog post about the topic. 

Let's just fast forward to what happened on New Year's Eve. Los Angeles Magazine (Jan 5) gives some details:

By midnight, packs of people were lined up in the street outside the secret venue, waiting for the doorman to wave them in. Inside, a couple hundred attendees, most of them unmasked, danced to rap and loudly cheered the arrival of 2021. They weren’t the only ones, of course. Miles away in the San Fernando Valley, a rowdy gang of TikTok influencers hosted upward of 600 people at a house party in Encino, where mask-free partiers smooshed shoulder to shoulder to count down to midnight. In Van Nuys, 50 revelers gathered at a ball-drop party hosted by the clothing line StockedUp, where young, maskless partiers danced and screamed over the music in anticipation of the new year. “Happy New Years. We fucking made it,” L.A.-based rapper Lil’ Death Star, who reportedly attended the Van Nuys party, said in a video posted to Instagram. “A lot of n—as didn’t make it to 2021. We did!” 

Coronavirus: What's the Situation in India?

India has a population that is over 4x that of the United States, and yet per Worldometer, India has far fewer total cases than we do. In fact, the United States is near all time highs in daily cases while India's cases have been in decline since September. What are some of the reasons given for why this is happening?

Reuters (Dec 18) reports: 

“If infections were surging, we would have seen the number of patients in hospitals go up, especially after the festival season. That has not happened,” said Raman Gangakhedkar, who until recently headed epidemiology at the Indian Council Of Medical Research.

A government-appointed panel tasked with making projections based on a mathematical model has estimated that 60% of India’s 1.35 billion people have already been infected with the virus.

That would indicate that over 800 million Indians already came down with COVID-19. Does that even make sense considering that officially only around 152,000 people have died due to COVID-19? This virus kills the elderly more than the young and India does have a young population of 28.4 compared to the United States at 38.4. Per Worldometer the deaths per million in India stands at 109 vs 1,186 in the United States. Does age really impact deaths to that degree? Let's look at Mexico which has an average age of 29.2, but has deaths per million of 1,056. If 60% of the population got infected, one would have to think that deaths per million would be well above 109. There is either some serious undercounting going on in terms of deaths or that 60% is just not realistic. Of course, perhaps they've figured out a way to better prevent those who come down with COVID-19 from getting seriously ill.

Algeria: President Tebboune Update

My last post on Algeria was in mid-September. I looked into the impact of COVID-19 on the protests.

I didn't read much about Algeria for a few weeks and when I did recently, I learned that President Tebboune came down with COVID-19 a month after my blog post. After getting taken to a hospital in Germany, he finally made a video message in December. Per Associated Press (Dec 13):

Still recovering from COVID-19, Algeria’s president suddenly reappeared Sunday after nearly two months out of the public eye, saying in a video message that it may still be several more weeks before he is fit enough to return to his North African country.

President Abdelmadjid Tebboune fell ill and then left for treatment in Germany in late October. Before his 4-minute, 54-second video on Sunday, his last public appearance had been in mid-October, meeting France’s foreign minister when he visited the former French colony.

Coronavirus: US Sanctions Hurting Iran's Response?

Back in October was my last blog post on COVID-19 and Iran. At the time, I discussed a director of the oldest hospital in Tehran who predicted that there would be 300,000 deaths in Iran if the disease continued for another 18 months. I was a touch skeptical of that claim. I know that official reports aren't accurate in Iran, but I was concluding that there were likely less than 60,000 deaths in the country at the time. Per Worldometer, the official deaths have not yet reached 60,000, but based on my October analysis deaths are probably closer to 90,000. Could Iran reach 300,000 deaths by March 2022? I think it is still a stretch. Even so, the disease may continue to spread for a much longer period of time in Iran due to US sanctions. Two of the below articles discuss this topic.

Associated Press (Dec 9) reports:

Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani said Wednesday that U.S. sanctions are making it difficult for Iran to purchase medicine and health supplies from abroad, including COVID-19 vaccines needed to contain the worst outbreak in the Middle East.

. . . While the United States insists that medicines and humanitarian goods are exempt from sanctions, restrictions on trade have made many banks and companies across the world hesitant to do business with Iran, fearing punitive measures from Washington. The country is also cut off from the international banking system, making it difficult to transfer payments.

Los Angeles Times Festival of Books: What's Next? The State of the American Economy

The Los Angeles Times has their annual Festival of Books. This year, of course, the discussion panels are being held online. That's my favorite part of the book festival. This was the 5th panel discussion I watched. This panel discussion was called, "What's Next? The State of the American Economy." Per YouTube, here's the introduction to the discussion:

How are corrupt systems organized and how have they shaped our government today? How are ordinary Americans affected by the rich and powerful who don’t play by the same rules? What can we do to close the racial wealth gap? These questions and more will be discussed by journalists and scholars Mehrsa Baradaran, Sarah Chayes and Jennifer Taub with the L.A. Times’ DC Bureau Chief Kimbriell Kelly moderating.

The following are my notes from the discussion:

Mehrsa Baradaran: UC Irvine Law Professor

We want markets to work and we need the rule of law. Crimes need to be prosecuted. The United States doesn't apply rules equally. Black Americans have suffered from slavery, Jim Crow laws and legal segregation. Black homes are worth less, because they are owned by Black people. Market tools won't fix that.         

Coronavirus: Spreading in Africa?

There have been warnings about the spread of COVID-19 in Africa since the start of this global pandemic. I wrote about it back in October and how the worst fears had yet to occurred. In that post, I wrote about concerns that COVID-19 cases could reach 10 million by October. As we can see in Worldometer, reported cases aren't even at 3 million yet. During much of the pandemic, it also looked like cases were largely isolated to the country of South Africa and various North African countries. Is COVID-19 now spreading throughout Africa?

Let's start by visiting Sorth Africa. The New York Times (Dec 26) reported about the country:

In South Africa, a crush of new cases that spread from Port Elizabeth is growing exponentially across the nation, with deaths mounting . . . Now, as they battle new outbreaks, doctors are convinced that deaths have also gone uncounted. Dr. John Black, the only infectious-disease specialist for adults in Port Elizabeth, said he and other physicians feared that many people were dying at home. Indeed, a government analysis showed that there had been more than twice as many excess deaths as could be explained by confirmed cases in South Africa. “We don’t know what the real number is,” he said.

Coronavirus: Los Angeles and Grocery Stores

The Los Angeles Times (Dec 20) is saying that supermarkets are being hit hard by COVID-19:

Outbreaks are increasing at an alarming rate across industries, officials say — an unavoidable consequence of so many people falling sick in the region. But those at grocery stores and other essential retailers pose a unique challenge for officials attempting to reduce coronavirus transmission, as well as for county residents trying to pare down their activities to only what is necessary. 

. . . County officials estimate that 1 in 80 people in the county are infectious with the coronavirus, the highest prevalence yet recorded. With so many people infected, it’s likelier than ever that a co-worker or customer could be ill, and that a single case could multiply into dozens.