Joseph Nocera

Nocera is not a fan of any pandemic mandates. He praises Ron DeSantis in his dealing with the pandemic in Florida saying he got it just right, protect the older people and let the younger ones do what they want. Later he compares the Florida death rate with California where Newsom enforces all the mandates. He says sure California comes off better, but if you subtract the older people, Florida does just great. So, in contrast with his original idea, I guess Nocera is saying to just let the virus do what it does and if we lose old people, that's the cost of doing business. I believe many GOP politicians expressed this exact idea. Oops, then he shows what a great job San Francisco did in protecting its older population. This was because, due to the need to react to the AIDS epidemic, San Francisco knew how to manage health care. So evidently what we needed was good health care management, not to throw up our hands and say, "Go, have fun." He does say he wonders if maybe San Francisco could have done just as good a job without all the mandates. Guess we'll never know, but they sure worked where they worked.
His analysis of the privatization of health care and the concept of "just in time" business management though, was right on point. Yes, it's more expensive to have staff and supplies on hand even when everything is going well, but it saves lives (and customers) in the end.… (altro)

It needed to do a better job sticking to the topic. I strove and failed to be interested in how private equity took over all the nursing homes. I wanted to hear more about the science of lockdowns and masking, and was it ever possible we could have kept it all from becoming politicized?

Interesting to hear about the lack of science behind boosters. Pfizer and Moderna wanted to keep selling shots - is this why we were encouraged to boost ourselves so frequently? I have lost count of how many shots I've had by now. Were ANY boosters really necessary? Something about long-lived T cells being more important than short-lived antibodies.

On that topic, they didn't explicitly mention "First Shots First" - which some were wisely calling for, while instead we boosted people who were first in line for the first shots. We should have been getting as many shots into arms, as they say, as possible, period. This is me talking now. We did need some order and prioritization, but doses going to waste, that was a crime.

Maybe the worst way we screwed up, in hindsight, was closing the schools for so long. But I worried about the teachers.… (altro)