Pandemic

If you rent a cheap Airbnb house in Las Vegas, you might not be altogether surprised to find dead crickets in the garage. But a thousand vials of medical samples in several freezers – and a centrifuge? After the cleaner and one guest fell ill at a property in the city’s Sunrise Manor neighborhood last week, federal agents raided it and found a whole laboratory’s worth of scientific kit of the kind more useful to medical scientists than, say, drug dealers. Curious. Curiouser still, the house belongs to a Chinese national named Jia Bei (Jesse) Zhu. He is currently in prison awaiting trial over a secret laboratory that (it is alleged) he was running in Reedley, California.

The search for the origin of Covid-19 has been a story of investigators who suddenly found themselves under investigation. Virus hunters who had spent years successfully tracking the origins of novel pathogens fell under suspicion of having caused the 2019 novel coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan. An international consortium of scientists, including collaborators in the US, had hunted for novel SARS-like viruses in South China and Southeast Asia, collecting tens of thousands of samples from not only bats but animals and people associated with the wildlife trade or living near bat caves. In the lab, the scientists grew or recreated these viruses and made chimeras to understand how they could infect people.

For all the confusion caused by President Biden’s recent declaration that “the pandemic is over,” and the familiar sight of administration officials rushing to qualify his comment, it raises a question: where does the Covid emergency actually stand? Having gone from draconian lockdowns to a summer of travel chaos in just over two years — with lots of political squabbling in between — it has been easy to lose track of both the remaining dangers and the precautions many health experts believe are needed going forward. Strictly speaking, Covid is still very much with us. The average number of daily cases in the US has floated between 50,000 and 60,000 since April of this year and the death toll remains fairly constant at 400 per day.

The other night, I went to the Vermont State Fair in distinctly downscale Rutland, where my wife and I watched the pig races, ambled through the livestock exhibits, and examined the farm equipment, while enjoying corndogs and the crowd of distinctly overweight Rutlanders. The next day, I was back in my office in midtown Manhattan. A thin man wearing a mask got into the elevator with me and used a cloth to press the elevator button. Then he used the cloth to open the two doors to the street. He was clearly annoyed to have had to share the elevator with a maskless heathen. As he walked away, it occurred to me that I hadn’t seen a single mask or Covid-crazed person of any sort at the Vermont State Fair.

Soaring gasoline prices (they’re up 49 percent since President Biden took office) are due to “Putin’s price hikes,” claims Biden. But last I checked, Putin wasn’t stateside canceling the Keystone XL Pipeline, pursuing efforts to end federal oil and gas leasing programs, and careening our country toward more Covid-like lockdowns, social isolation, supply chain shortages, and another summer crime wave. A brief recap of Biden’s oil and gastastrophe: in January 2021, during his first days in office, the president revoked the Keystone Pipeline permit and issued an executive order that, in his own typically eloquent words, directed the “Secretary of the Interior to stop issuing new oil and gas leases on public lands and offsh- — and offshore waters, wherever possible.

I was seven months pregnant in March, 2020. I had miscarried before, and it had taken a little while to conceive, so even before the world became anxious about reports of a novel coronavirus, I was a nervous wreck. When the pandemic came in earnest, I was utterly overcome. I had been working on a live news show. Every day in late February, and even at the very beginning of March, we were telling Americans to wash their hands, but that everything would be okay. Local politicians and medical experts came on the show to tell people it was all going to be fine. This was The Before. One day, I came into the studio during a commercial.

On Tuesday, the Florida Senate passed the Parental Rights in Education bill, and Democrats lost their minds. The Florida left is in a bind these days. Governor Ron DeSantis is shaping the state in his image and Florida is all but guaranteed to go red for the foreseeable future. Yet their recent behavior is desperate even for them. Democrats are having trouble finding suitable candidates to run for statewide elections in 2022 — Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, for instance, isn’t seeking to reclaim her old seat — so it’s not a surprise that they’ve gone all in with the emotional scare tactics and sleight-of-hand rhetorical tricks that increasingly epitomize their party. The approach, however, is misfiring, only serving to prepare DeSantis for his inevitable 2024 presidential bid.

A new Johns Hopkins systematic review cuts in two the narrative that government-imposed mandates meaningfully prevent coronavirus deaths. The review looked at 34 different studies analyzing business and school closings, shelter-in-place orders, and international travel bans. It included data from US and European Covid mitigation efforts, along with endeavors in India, South Africa and China. Almost two dozen of these studies were peer-reviewed, while the other 12 were working papers. The results of this meta-analysis are striking. Lockdowns reduced Covid mortality by an average of only .02 percent. Shelter-in-place orders were slightly better at a 2.9 percent average, but nothing worth crowing about.