"I'm going to reflect on the recurring feeling I have of impending doom. We have so much to look forward to... but right now, I'm scared."

"We have come such a long way...just please hold on a little while longer. I so badly want to be done. I know you all so badly want to be done. We are just almost there, just not quite yet." 

Said CDC Director Rochelle Walensky:

Not long after that, as the NYT reports:

President Biden on Monday called on governors and mayors to maintain or reinstate mask-wearing orders, saying that because of “reckless behavior,” the coronavirus was again spreading fast, threatening the progress the nation has made so far against the pandemic. “People are letting up on precautions, which is a very bad thing,” he said. “We are giving up hard-fought, hard-won gains.”...

Asked if states should pause their reopening efforts, the president replied simply, “Yes.” He said that governors, mayors, local officials and businesses should demand mask-wearing, calling it a “patriotic duty” that is crucial to the nation’s fight against the virus.

"Stay home Patrick of Tennessee. We don’t need maga anti-vaxers spreading pestilence across our country. As a matter of fact, don’t even leave your trailer park."

"Board the doors shut and stay inside with your AR-15. I think all of these anti-vaxers should be required to have ‘do not resuscitate’ tattooed on their foreheads." 

Says the top-rated commenter on a Washington Post article, "‘Vaccine passports’ are on the way, but developing them won’t be easy/White House-led effort tries to corral more than a dozen initiatives." 

The commenter is responding to this: 

There is evidence vaccine passports could motivate skeptical Americans to get shots. Several vaccine-hesitant participants at a recent focus group of Trump voters led by pollster Frank Luntz suggested their desire to see family, go on vacation and resume other aspects of daily life outpaced fear of the shots, particularly if travel companies and others moved to require proof of vaccination....

Some attendees dissented and warned that requiring a credential would backfire. “I would change my travel plans,” said a man identified as Patrick of Tennessee.

Is the developing opinion that only troglodytes resist vaccine passports? Because I just noticed this:

This is the absolute end of the line for human liberty in the West and if you don’t understand why, ask a techie. Once you agree to this platform any functionality can be loaded into it turning off and on access to society, goods, information, movement, based on your behavior. https://t.co/PtxbtqVfw1

— Dr Naomi Wolf (@naomirwolf) March 28, 2021

Don't conflate resistance to vaccine passports with resistance to getting vaccinated. That's what I think the WaPo commenter did. Patrick of Tennessee objected to "requiring a credential," not to getting vaccinated.

ADDED: I think Wolf may be an anti-vaxxer, so her warning isn't scary.

SO: Let's look at the Guardian article she links to, "Give pause before you raise a glass to the prospect of a vaccine passport/The prime minister’s ‘papers for pints’ scheme is nothing less than a national ID card by stealth." 

Obviously, that's the UK, and in the U.S., the "passports" would probably be handled at the state level, like our other IDs. I can imagine the question of vaccine passports in the U.S. getting swirled up into the voter ID drama. Is getting an ID oppressive or something everyone should gladly, willingly do? 

From The Guardian: 

The UK has already toyed with national ID cards. It rejected them in 2010. As Theresa May, then home secretary, explained in 2010: “This isn’t just about cost savings, it’s actually about the principle, it’s about getting the balance right between national security and civil liberties, and that’s what the new coalition government is doing.”...

Already, the Conservatives have announced plans to introduce a bill to make photo ID mandatory from 2023 for all UK-wide and English elections....

Aha! It is already mixed up in the voter ID matter in the UK. 

[T]here would be no need to make photo ID mandatory at elections if people could simply use their “vaccine passport” – because, once we’ve built a system that links our identity to our health data and made this a condition of re-entering pubs, cinemas or concerts, or even our workplace, we could link it to other data too, public or private. This could be used by more than just pub landlords or election officials. The data on our vaccine passports could be used by the police, just as Singapore’s authorities admitted in January to using contact-tracing data.

All this – effectively, as I say, a stealth national ID card without the necessary debate – when we don’t even know if vaccine passports would help to solve our biggest problem: stopping the spread of the virus....

In January, the health secretary, Matt Hancock, said: “We are not a papers-carrying country.” Yet, here we are, with the government reviewing plans to become just that. Only last month, the vaccine minister, Nadhim Zahawi, ruled out vaccine passports, arguing that they could be “discriminatory” since it is not compulsory for people to get the vaccine.

But some Americans (like the commenter at WaPo quoted above) are enthusiastic about discriminating against anti-vaxxers.

Israel, Estonia, Sweden and Denmark are all countries that have introduced, or plan to introduce, vaccine passports for domestic use. There is a key difference: all of them already have a national ID card system. If we are to follow their example, we would first need an evidence-based explanation as to how vaccine passports will help to stop the spread of the virus.... 

The pandemic has made armchair public health experts of us all, but we need to hear from the real ones to know which trade-offs are necessary, and which are not, as we move into whatever phase is coming next....

I don't think that public health experts can be the last word on "trade-offs," and I don't even know if they can be considered experts on vaccine passports. The issue is whether, given the level of immunity we've already built up, we should limit certain facilities to people who've had the vaccine and, if so, whether we need  them to prove their status with an official government document? 

And what are the collateral effects of this document? Are we concerned about government surveillance and losing our privacy? Are we collaterally enthused because the document could become the voter ID?

"CDC relaxes distance requirements in schools from 6 to 3 feet/The change applies only to students, not teachers or other adult staff..

NBC reports.

The change comes amid a massive push to get kids back in the classroom, from lawmakers to parents. Multiple studies have shown increases in depression and anxiety among children during the pandemic. And a survey from NBC News and Challenge Success, a nonprofit affiliated with the Stanford Graduate School of Education, found lower stress levels among students who have been able to spend time in the classroom, compared with peers who are virtual learning exclusively.

"Trump’s a liberal New Yorker. Why would we listen to him either?"

Said one guy quoted in "Oklahoma Diner Customers Tell CNN They Won’t Get Vaccinated Even If Trump Told Them to: Why Listen to a ‘Liberal New Yorker’ Like Him?" (CNN). 

I'm making a new tag for this: "Trumpism without Trump." 

Hypothesis: Trump the Man was only ever a man stepping into The Idea of Trump, and that man can step out again, or he can try to stay in but not measure up, and somebody else can take on the Trump role and become real embodiment of The Idea of Trump while Trump the Man melts back into his ordinary human life, and the Trumpsters can continue as true believers whether there is a person in the role of Trump or not.

"For years, Republicans used welfare to drive a wedge between the white working middle class and the poor."

"Ronald Reagan portrayed Black, inner-city mothers as freeloaders and con artists, repeatedly referring to 'a woman in Chicago' as the 'welfare queen.'... And the tension between the working class and the poor was easily exploited: Why should 'they' get help for not working when 'we' get no help, and we work? By the time Clinton campaigned for president, 'ending welfare as we knew it' had become a talisman of so-called New Democrats, even though there was little or no evidence that welfare benefits discouraged the unemployed from taking jobs.... Yet when COVID hit, public assistance was no longer necessary just for 'them.' It was needed by 'us.'... The CARES Act, which [Trump] signed into law at the end of March, gave most Americans checks of $1,200 (to which he attached his name). When this proved enormously popular, he demanded the next round of stimulus checks be $2,000... But the real game changer... is the breadth of Biden's plan.... Rather than pit the working middle class against the poor, this bill unites them in its sheer expansiveness... Over 70 percent of Americans support the bill... The economic lesson is that Reaganomics is officially dead. It's clearer than ever.... Give cash to the bottom two-thirds and their purchasing power will drive growth for everyone."

Writes Robert Reich in "How Bidenomics Can Unite America" (Newsweek).

"Asian-Americans are AMERICANS/They have nothing to do with a repressive Communist Party or with a virus that originated 7000 miles away on the other side of the world/Anyone without enough common sense to understand that is an idiot."

Tweeted Marco Rubio yesterday. I'm reading that quoted in a WaPo article: "Democrats link Atlanta massacre to anti-Asian rhetoric during pandemic." 

From the article: 

Authorities investigating the spasm of violence in Georgia say early signs pointed to a disturbed suspect who claimed he was a sex addict and who saw the spas as “a source of temptation that needed to be eliminated.” Authorities said it was too early to know whether the killings were also racially motivated. 

But many advocates and Democratic lawmakers said it was hard to separate Tuesday’s killings from the recent increase in anti-Asian animus, including rhetoric from President Donald Trump.... While many Democrats were quick to condemn the shooting and link it to Trump’s rhetoric, Republicans remained mostly quiet....

Trump repeatedly blamed China for unleashing the virus on the world — and tanking the United States’ economy. During the tirades, Trump repeatedly used racially insensitive names like “China virus,” “Wuhan virus” and “kung flu.”...

An Asian American schoolteacher and her husband found a slur spray-painted on the side of their Nissan Altima after leaving a movie theater. An Asian American man on his way to a boba tea shop was told, “Thanks for covid.” Across the nation, authorities have investigated roughly 3,800 incidents of anti-Asian abuse, advocates say....

Rubio's tweet is important. Imagine a new rule against criticizing China! But how many of us Americans are the "idiots" Rubio is talking about? These "idiots" are on both sides, politically. Trump, criticizing China, didn't highlight the distinction between China, the country, and people with Chinese ancestry. And Trump's antagonists enthusiastically blurred the distinction. 

I put "idiots" in quotes for 2 reasons:

1. I don't use that word, because it risks collateral damage to people who have lesser intellectual gifts.

2. Many of the people blurring the distinction between China, the country, and people with Chinese ancestry are intelligent and devious. To call these people "idiots" is to let them off the hook.

From the Online Etymology entry for "idiot": 

early 14c., "person so mentally deficient as to be incapable of ordinary reasoning;" also in Middle English "simple man, uneducated person, layman" (late 14c.), from Old French idiote "uneducated or ignorant person" (12c.), from Latin idiota "ordinary person, layman; outsider," in Late Latin "uneducated or ignorant person," from Greek idiotes "layman, person lacking professional skill" (opposed to writer, soldier, skilled workman), literally "private person" (as opposed to one taking part in public affairs), used patronizingly for "ignorant person," from idios "one's own" (see idiom).

In plural, the Greek word could mean "one's own countrymen."... 

Ha ha. That took a funny turn. 

ADDED: I read this post out loud to Meade, and he said: "We’re idiots, babe/It’s a wonder we can even feed ourselves." And: "From the Grand Coulee Dam to the Capitol."

Source material:

Idiot wind, blowing like a circle around my skull 

From the Grand Coulee Dam to the Capitol... 

Idiot wind, blowing through the buttons of our coats 

Blowing through the letters that we wrote 

Idiot wind, blowing through the dust upon our shelves

We’re idiots, babe

It’s a wonder we can even feed ourselves

"Many schools have been held back by CDC standards saying that they only permit in-person classrooms if students sit no closer than six feet apart."

"This requirement makes full-time schooling impossible, because schools simply don’t have enough room to teach every student while spacing them so far apart. But that requirement, chosen hastily last year, turns out to be useless. The most important scientific advance is the recent conclusion that the guideline that students must maintain six feet of distance in schools has no value. David Zweig reported for New York last week that 'the CDC’s six-foot guidance and tethering school openings to community transmission does not reflect the science'.... [A] trio of doctors in the Washington Post, likewise concludes, 'Keeping students three feet apart instead of requiring them to stay six feet apart won’t make students or teachers and staff less safe.'... But that crippling and hastily erected barrier has remained in place even after it has been proven useless.... [O]pponents of reopening have managed to maintain the appearance of controversy... by emphasizing uncertainty about the precise level of danger, explicitly or implicitly setting a baseline of zero risk as the correct standard for resuming school...."

From "Just Reopen the Schools Now" by Jonathan Chait (NY Magazine).

Chait quotes a WaPo columnist, Valerie Strauss, who insists that "There is no such thing as learning loss." Strauss opines, dreamily [CORRECTION: The author of these quotes is Strauss’s guest columnist, Rachael Gabriel.]

Learning is never lost, though it may not always be “found” on pre-written tests of pre-specified knowledge or preexisting measures of pre-coronavirus notions of achievement....

We have all learned, every day, unconditionally… They learned to take gym class on YouTube, that people you have never met can be your greatest teachers, that the ability to go outside and play during the day makes every day brighter, and that their safety depends on the decisions of others.

Yeah, you are always learning something. You can learn how to play video games. You can learn how to take naps... and drugs. Oh! The places you go when you don't leave the house!

Or go play in the yard. And stop being so prejudiced against different types of learning! They're all worthy of respect in the rainbow of education.

And if you ever think you're missing out on learning, don't go looking any further than your own backyard. Because if it isn't there, you never really lost it to begin with!