Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: COVID-19 is still with us

This post was originally published on this site

We begin today with Ed Yong of The Atlantic writing about the continuing grief of those who loved ones died from COVID-19.

When covid grievers tell others about their loss, they tend to get the same responses. Do you know how they were exposed? Did they have a preexisting condition? Were they vaccinated? Every griever I interviewed has faced these questions, from online trolls and close friends alike, and with shocking immediacy. People regularly ask Rekha if her dead mother was vaccinated before they offer condolences or sympathies. “It’s not just one time; it’s all the time,” she said. “It’s all the time,” Kristin Urquiza echoed.  “Pretty much from every person,” says Christina Faria, who lost her mother, Viola, late last year.

In 1989, the grief expert Kenneth Doka coined the term disenfranchised grief to describe situations where people struggle to cope with losses that aren’t “socially sanctioned, openly acknowledged, or publicly mourned.” That’s exactly what many Americans who have lost someone to COVID are experiencing. The words we normally use to console grievers honor the relationships that death disrupts: I’m sorry for your loss. But the questions that COVID grievers get “reduce the person to the disease,” Rebecca Morse, who studies death and loss at Divine Mercy University and is a former president of the Association for Death Education and Counseling, told me. And they cast judgment upon the circumstances around their infection, “which makes these deaths stigmatized and shameful,” Morse said. If the deceased was unvaccinated, went to a bar, or had preexisting health problems, their life becomes devalued, and their death becomes less tragic. When hearing about Viola’s death, “everyone is like, ‘Oh, she was 76’ or ‘She had heart surgery’ or ‘She was overweight. What did you expect? Of course she was going to be the one to die,’” Christina told me. Especially after vaccines became available, COVID became lumped with causes of death such as lung cancer, liver disease, and AIDS, which society classifies as self-inflicted and therefore worthy of blame rather than sympathy. Instead of getting support, many COVID grievers have been forced to defend their loved ones and justify their grief.

I lost a first cousin to COVID-19 in October 2021 and I’ve been in most (if not all) of the various states that Yong mentions including, I think, casting a bit of judgment (for reasons that I wrote about when my cousin R. was sick).

Charles M. Blow of The New York Times notes that, perhaps, the entire country is going through severe trauma not simply because of the deaths of one million Americans due to COVID but also changing ways in which we live as a society.

There can’t be that much death and mourning without severe consequences. But the deaths are only part of the story. There was also all of the sickness — 80 million Americans have caught Covid — and all of the havoc the virus has wreaked on our lives.

Our children couldn’t go to school. We couldn’t gather to celebrate weddings or graduations or the births of new babies. We couldn’t gather to properly mourn, to lay hands on one another, to hug tight enough to make the tears flow and hold the hug until they stopped.

Human beings are social creatures. We need to gather. We need to touch and be touched. We need community. But the virus put some of our basic humanity into suspended animation.

Society is aching, grasping, acting out, sometimes violently. We see the signs all around us. Sometimes it’s just a dramatic change in the way we live our lives.

Maayan Hoffman of The Washington Post notes that because of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, there has been a ripple affect with Russian attempts at “vaccine diplomacy.”

Russia hoped its vaccine would be used worldwide to help stop the pandemic, that the shot would bring geopolitical and economic gains and restore its glory as a superpower, lost with the fall of the Soviet Union. The country named its vaccine Sputnik V after the first artificial satellite, Sputnik I, developed in 1957, which beat out the United States in the space race.

Sputnik V has been approved in 71 countries with more than 4 billion people, and its newest jab, Sputnik Light, has gained recognition in 30 nations, according to data provided by Sputnik.

But nearly two years later, Gamaleya and RDIF have sold fewer than 300 million doses, and less than 2.5 percent of the people vaccinated worldwide have taken a Sputnik shot, according to data from the World Trade Organization.

By contrast, China’s Sinovac and Sinopharm vaccines — with lower reported efficacy — have accounted for more than 5.3 billion doses, the WTO data shows.

The Russian independent media outlet Meduza summarizes varied reporting on the evacuation of Ukrainian citizens to Russia.

Ukraine’s Human Rights Commissioner Lyudmyla Denisova also reported that more than 700,000 Ukrainians were taken to Russia. However, the TASS source broke down this figure differently, claiming that more than 737,000 people “from Ukraine and from the Donbas” had crossed the border, including more than 200,000 Russian citizens, more than 400,000 “citizens” of the self-proclaimed “Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics,” and 117,000 “citizens of other countries” (apparently, this last figure includes Ukrainian nationals). Whether or not TASS and its source consider all residents of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions of Ukraine “citizens of the DNR and LNR” by default is unclear.[…]

People who were “evacuated” from Ukraine to Russia have confirmed the allegations of coercion and “filtration,” according to a number of testimonies published in the media. Accounts from refugees brought to Russia from Mariupol and surrounding areas have been published by CNN and Current Time TV, among others.

Some of these eyewitnesses said that Russian forces came to the places where they were sheltering from bombardments and ordered them to evacuate; others were forced to go to Russian checkpoints because it was physically impossible for them to evacuate to Ukrainian territory. Some described coming under psychological pressure from Russian forces, who told them that “Ukraine doesn’t care about you” and “no one will evacuate you from here.” Britain’s inews claims that refugees from Mariupol were made to sign documents alleging that the Ukrainian military was shelling the city, and were then told that they could no longer return to Ukraine due to the threat of persecution (the authenticity of these documents has not been independently confirmed).

Chris York of New Lines magazine looks at the preparations that some in Ukraine have made to battle Russian disinformation.

Whereas in the West, Russian disinformation is mainly associated with specific events such as the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Brexit or the Skripal poisonings, in Ukraine there has been a yearslong and unrelenting campaign to undermine the very state itself.

“We started noticing during the revolution of dignity in 2013 that Russia was actively pursuing narratives of Ukraine being either a Nazi state or a failed state,” says a Ukrainian program manager at an international NGO who wished to remain anonymous.

In the information warfare space, aside from an uptick in disinformation, nothing much changed on Feb. 24. On the ground things were obviously very different.

“We were launching a project on [Feb.] 24, and I remember I was hearing bombing outside my apartment, and I was like, ‘OK, we have to launch it anyway,’” says Iliuk.

“Maybe it was shock,” Iliuk explains. “I love my work and it calms me down, so I knew it was the only thing I could do to be useful.

Hans von der Burchard of POLITICO Europe reports on diplomatic tensions between Ukraine and Germany because of Ukrainian President Zelensky’s decision to not welcome German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier to a meeting in Kyiv.

The move was a humiliation for Steinmeier — a former foreign minister closely associated with Berlin’s previous policy of pursuing close economic and diplomatic ties with Russia — but also for Germany as a whole. As federal president, Steinmeier is the highest-ranking representative of the German state.

The fact Zelenskyy communicated his decision just hours before Steinmeier’s planned secret trip, after days of preparation between Berlin and Kyiv, and that Ukrainian officials leaked the snub to German tabloid Bild, deepened the diplomatic insult for Germany.

Chancellor Olaf Scholz said he found Zelenskyy‘s decision not to welcome Steinmeier “irritating.”

Reacting to a Ukrainian invitation for him to visit Ukraine himself, Scholz told RBB24 radio he was not planning any such trip in the near future. The chancellor argued that he had been to Kyiv just about a week before the outbreak of the war and that he was speaking regularly to Zelenskyy on the phone, most recently on Sunday.

Melanie Amann and Veit Medick of Der Spiegel conduct a combative interview with German President Steinmeier about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

DER SPIEGEL: Putin is waging a war in Ukraine, has apparently had civilians murdered and has threatened the use of nuclear weapons. You saw all that coming?

Steinmeier: No. I have been a witness to the changes in Russia’s political course. But, to be honest, I still hoped that Vladimir Putin possessed a remnant of rationality. I did not think that the Russian president would risk his country’s complete political, economic and moral ruin in the pursuit of an imperial delusion. The attack has shaken me.

DER SPIEGEL: What prevented you from seeing Putin’s true face?

Steinmeier: His face hasn’t always been the same. But we also aren’t able to choose with whom we must deal. I consider myself to be among those who have worked hard to ensure that war never again returns to Europe. That effort was not successful. Were the goals therefore misguided? Was it wrong to work to achieve them? That is the debate that I, that we must now hold.

Paul Krugman of The New York Times says that inflation is probably about to decline soon…but don’t get too excited about it.

Why expect inflation to come down? Surging gasoline prices accounted for half of March’s price rise, but it now appears that the world oil market overshot in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. A lot of Russian oil is probably still reaching world markets, and President Biden’s million-barrel-a-day release from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve makes up for much of the shortfall. As of this morning, crude oil prices were barely above their pre-Ukraine level, and the wholesale price of gasoline was down about 60 cents a gallon from its peak last month.

Beyond that, there are growing indications that the bullwhip is about to flick back.

What? The bullwhip effect is a familiar issue for products that are at the end of long supply chains: Changes at the consumer end can lead to greatly exaggerated changes farther up the chain. Suppose, to take a non-random example, that a shift to working from home — then, coronavirus panic — leads to increased purchases of supermarket toilet paper (which is a somewhat different product from the stuff used in offices). Consumers, seeing a shortage, rush to stock up; supermarkets, trying to meet the demand, overorder; distributors who supply the supermarkets overorder even more; and suddenly there are no rolls to be had.

Christian Paz of Vox writes about the return old-school homophobia to mainstream discourse.

In the span of what seemed like a week, old-school bigotry felt mainstreamed. Sitting members of Congress, cable news hosts, and conservative intellectuals coalesced around “ok, groomer” discourse as a new way to attack LGBTQ Americans — not just the teachers these bills are targeting. Their attacks come in a country that is more accepting of queer Americans than at any other time in history; about eight in 10 Americans back nondiscrimination laws protecting LGBTQ people. But suddenly, it seemed, 20th-century homophobia acquired a modern, QAnon-esque edge.

“If you’re against the Anti-Grooming Bill, you are probably a groomer or at least you don’t denounce the grooming of 4-8 year old children,” Christina Pushaw, DeSantis’s press secretary, tweeted at the beginning of March. On his talk radio show last week, conservative activist Charlie Kirk tied same-sex marriage and the acceptance of LGBTQ Americans to corrupting children: “We’re talking about gay stuff more than any other time. Why? Because they are not happy just having marriage. Instead, they now want to corrupt your children.”

The feedback loop of anti-LGBTQ legislation and “grooming” discourse reveals new dimensions to the conservative movement’s efforts to stymie the progress of recent years: Some members of the political right see opportunities to wield their advantages in the nation’s increasingly conservative courts against LGBTQ people — and opportunities to claw back the ground they’ve lost in the culture war as Americans’ opposition to discrimination grows.

As hurricane season approaches, Bob Berwyn of Inside Climate News reports that studies show that Atlantic hurricane seasons will continue to get more severe.

A study published on Wednesday in the journal Weather and Climate Dynamics reinforces the growing consensus that the hurricane threat to vulnerable coastal communities will keep increasing. The research shows global warming has “contributed to a decisive increase in Atlantic Ocean hurricane activity” in the last 40 years and doubled the chances for extreme seasons like 2020.

That was the most active hurricane season on record, when tropical storms started early, ended late and included 11 tropical systems hitting the United States, with seven major hurricanes and one subtropical system even making it all the way to Portugal. Every single mile of the U.S. Atlantic coastline was under a tropical storm watch or warning during the 2020 season.

The study reinforces the growing consensus that vulnerable coastal communities need to prepare more for years like 2020, said lead author Peter Pfleiderer, a research scientist with Climate Analytics, a nonprofit climate science and policy think tank.

Robin Givhan of The Washington Post analyzes President Biden’s press conference on his executive order regarding “ghost guns.”

As he began his remarks, Biden emphasized that ghost guns do not look like toys and that they’re as lethal as any other weapon. He clarified to his audience that assembling one didn’t require a degree in mechanical engineering, only the most basic tools and the ability to put round pegs into round holes.

Then Biden interrupted his speech and moved away from the microphone and over to a nearby table. He kept talking and his sharp words, “Take a look. Take a look at this,” hung in the air. The ghost gun’s red case was propped open on the table and the weapon was displayed in front of it in a nature morte. Biden picked up the gun gingerly and positioned it sideways. He didn’t wrap his hands around the grip of the gun. He held it away from his body. He held it like a foreign object.

He let his audience of lawmakers, gun control advocates and folks who had suffered through gun violence — along with anyone watching remotely — get a good look at precisely the sort of weapon about which he was speaking. And his body language made plain how he felt about it.

Polly Toynbee of the Guardian says that the Tories should really care that Bojo the Clown has become the first British Prime Minister to be fined for breaking the law…but they don’t.

Breaking the law and lying about it or misleading the house would have seen any other prime minister and chancellor resign instantly. But nothing can make them go if they cling to their posts. Only their own MPs can oust them, with a flurry of those famous letters to the backbench 1922 committee chair. There should be queues forming outside Sir Graham Brady’s door right now, but don’t hold your breath. Instead, you hear calculating perplexity: without them, who would be our winning leader? But for the sake of their reputations, these MPs should only consider the probity of their party.

More sententiously, they pretend concern for the country: a war is no time to ditch a leader. Really? In both world wars, inadequate leaders were dumped unceremoniously for someone better suited for that serious and decisive role. None of them selected Boris Johnson expecting him to make a war leader. God knows how long the war in Ukraine may last, but the time may come, before long, when citizens across Nato countries will be asked to make sacrifices, in energy, in supply lines, in taxes. An immoral lawbreaker who has failed to acknowledge the grievousness of his own behaviour is hardly the man to call on others to tighten their belts in the national interest.

One of the more controversial issues in the news yesterday occurred in Minneapolis as the Minnesota Twins hosted the Los Angeles Dodgers.

Mr. October, himself, had a few words to say on it.

I understand why Dodgers manager Dave Roberts pulled Kershaw. I’m with Mr. October on this one, though.

Finally today, Jeffrey Barg, The Grammarian writes for the Philadelphia Inquirer on the poor grammar, language, and usage contained in a “Don’t Say Gay” bill in Pennsylvania.

Just three days after Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill was signed into law, one of Pennsylvania’s own state senators announced he’s introducing his own Keystone-flavored version, which would ban library books that someone — anyone? — decides are “sexually explicit.”

Lancaster County Sen. Ryan Aument is sponsoring the legislation because, he says, “Parents must be confident that their children are receiving a quality education in our schools without being exposed to inappropriate, sexually explicit content.”

Unfortunately, judging from the poor grammar and language in Aument’s cosponsorship memo, he wouldn’t know “quality education” if it burned up in a book bonfire.

First, there’s the memo’s lack of precision. It reads in part: “parents have identified books and assignments provided to their children that contain sexually explicit content that adults would be prohibited from viewing while at work.” That regulation depends on where those adults work — how many people have jobs where they can sit around reading for pleasure? — but “sexually explicit,” we’ve learned, means different things to different people. Effective writing, not to mention effective laws, must be precise to convey the proper meaning.

I think that imprecise grammar and language is the point of these bills to encourage the broadest and most bigoted of interpretations.

Everyone have a great day!