A Picture of the New World

Amanda Gorman blew us away at Joe Biden's Inauguration by laying out a radically hopeful future.  Here she is again, describing the new world.  Scoff if you will, but someone's got to say it, and it might be true.

  ‘New Day’s Lyric‘

May this be the day

We come together.

Mourning, we come to mend,

Withered, we come to weather,

Torn, we come to tend,

Battered, we come to better.

Tethered by this year of yearning,

We are learning

That though we weren’t ready for this,

We have been readied by it.

We steadily vow that no matter

How we are weighed down,

We must always pave a way forward.

This hope is our door, our portal.

Even if we never get back to normal,

Someday we can venture beyond it,

To leave the known and take the first steps.

So let us not return to what was normal,

But reach toward what is next.

What was cursed, we will cure.

What was plagued, we will prove pure.

Where we tend to argue, we will try to agree,

Those fortunes we forswore, now the future we foresee,

Where we weren’t aware, we’re now awake;

Those moments we missed

Are now these moments we make,

The moments we meet,

And our hearts, once all together beaten,

Now all together beat.

Come, look up with kindness yet,

For even solace can be sourced from sorrow.

We remember, not just for the sake of yesterday,

But to take on tomorrow.

We heed this old spirit,

In a new day’s lyric,

In our hearts, we hear it:

For auld lang syne, my dear,

For auld lang syne.

Be bold, sang Time this year,

Be bold, sang Time,

For when you honor yesterday,

Tomorrow ye will find.

Know what we’ve fought

Need not be forgotten nor for none.

It defines us, binds us as one,

Come over, join this day just begun.

For wherever we come together,

We will forever overcome.

                                                             Amanda Gorman – New Year’s Poem:

Go Army!

I have to say, I was a little excited to hear about the Army's progress in the COVID war:

Within weeks, scientists at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research expect to announce that they have developed a vaccine that is effective against COVID-19 and all its variants, even Omicron, as well as previous SARS-origin viruses that have killed millions of people worldwide.

Who knew that the Army did vaccines?  Suddenly, we're all glad they do.

Of course, this is early in the process, no matter what the hyperbolic headlines would lead you to think.  As Kevin Drum notes, 

There are several caveats here. The first, obviously, is that the new vaccine has to undergo Phase 2 and Phase 3 trials before it can be approved for the general population. The second is that even if it works, we don't yet know how effective it is. And the third is that we don't know how long it lasts.  Ironically, testing is being delayed because so many people are already vaxed or have gotten COVID. 

So:  it's not fully tested; we don't know if it works; and we don't have any of those magic effectiveness percentages.  And it may take longer than usual to finish human testing since so many humans have vaccines in them already, and those that don't are not going to be good vaccine tests subjects.

But it's a start.  Go Army!

In Case You Missed It...

 ...like I did (it was yesterday)...

Two years, and things are just getting worse.  

And after all that time, no clear idea of what the new world will look like, except for the vast number of people who hope it will be just like 2019.

Of course, they are probably not remembering that Donald Trump was President in 2019.  And 2020.  820,000+ deaths ago.

So it goes.

Now It's 2024

Just thought you'd want to know.

Until then:

Actual News

 Well, there's actual news.  That didn't take long.

By now, you've heard about the Omicron variant of the COVID virus.  Almost everything that we learn about this variant is yet to come, because we don't know much at all right now.  Omicron's structure has been analyzed, and it seems that it could be trouble, on the transmissibility front and the vaccine-evading front.  But we don't have any evidence of how it actually works in the real world, because we haven't identified enough people who have it for long enough to tell us anything.

But a line in the CNN article about Omicron seems ominous:  

"Vaccine makers were fast to identify the variant as a concern. Moderna said the Omicron variant represents a 'significant potential risk' to its Covid-19 vaccine."

Uh-oh. 

I just got boostered with Moderna - essentially my third Moderna shot - last week.  And this little bugger may know the way around all of them.

That would be very bad news, and change the game, so to speak.  More to come.

More Drifting, This Time in the Wrong Direction

In case you've been holding your breath (which I hope you haven't, because little or nothing is happening on the new world front, not to mention the New World front), CNN tells us that there is, at the moment, no way to tell when the pandemic is "over."  Incredibly, there is no generally approved of dividing line between "pandemic" and "endemic."  You'd think that some authoritative public health agency would have published some work on this, but, apparently... no.  As Dr. Arnold Monto, "a professor of epidemiology at the University of Michigan and acting chair of the US Food and Drug Administration's Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee" said recently, we have to "wait and see and hold our breath" to unlock what an endemic phase of the coronavirus might look like.

Thanks, Arnold.  

As the indefatigable Annie Laurie tells us over at Balloon Juice, there are many important ways that things are getting worse, not better, thus pushing that vague finish line we are holding our breath to catch a glimpse of much further away.  Just today, the Czech Republic, South Korea and Slovakia have set records for daily infections, and Russia set another daily record for deaths.*  COVID deaths in Europe generally rose 5% last week.  Here in the US, cases are up 14% in the last week.  And "the head of Germany’s disease control agency has warned that the country faces a “really terrible Christmas” unless steps are taken to..." well, to do things that we've already seen we're not willing to do.  Fröhliche Weihnachten!

So, not only do we not know how to tell when we get where we're going, we're insisting on sailing in the wrong direction.  This is, in large part, the reason for the sparse flow of posts here at the New World.  

See you when there's actual news.

 * - Russia has been setting daily records for deaths most days for weeks and weeks.

The "End" of the Pandemic

We seem to be trudging on and on and on.  We do not know how to find our way to the post-COVID trailhead.  We are without direction and without a guide.  We have given up, it seems, the game of speculating about the post-COVID world.  The new world.  There is nothing to write about, it seems, and no one is writing.

But we do know two things about the post-COVID world.  Two dimensions, out of many - or maybe only these two, plus the old world, will make up the new.

First, we know that the new world will contain COVID-19, because we have made so many stupid mistakes over such a long time that the virus will become endemic and it will be with us always, killing and damaging us to an extent that will still not be extreme enough to teach us some useful lessons.  One more deadly disease - but this one, for the first time, perhaps ever, has divided us in a way that may make it impossible for us to bring what we know about public health to bear.  Good luck with that, new world.

Secondly, the new world will contain long COVID.  A certain proportion of those who have contracted the virus - even those who showed no symptoms - will suffer a wide variety of physical and neurological conditions that do not sound like a lot of fun.  We're still learning about long-COVID, but the CDC is in no doubt that it is real.  Here's their list of known effects: 

• Difficulty breathing or shortness of breath
• Tiredness or fatigue
• Symptoms that get worse after physical or mental activities (also known as post-exertional malaise)
• Difficulty thinking or concentrating (sometimes referred to as “brain fog”)
• Cough
• Chest or stomach pain
• Headache
• Fast-beating or pounding heart (also known as heart palpitations)
• Joint or muscle pain
• Pins-and-needles feeling
• Diarrhea
• Sleep problems
• Fever
• Dizziness on standing (lightheadedness)
• Rash
• Mood changes
• Change in smell or taste
• Changes in menstrual period cycles

No one gets all of them, but no one gets just one or two, it seems.  And there are those who begin to experience organ damage due to an inappropriate auto-immune response - the autoimmune system begins to attack healthy cells in healthy organs, causing inflammation or tissue damage; affected are "heart, lung, kidney, skin, and brain functions."

And that's not to mention - if your COVID journey has led you to the ICU - the PTSD.

I feel like I've done this math before, but here goes.  Long COVID affects between one third and one half of all COVID patients, both symptomatic and asyptomatic.  So - let's say 40%.  If you don't like that number, you can do your own math.

As of this writing, according to Worldometer, 245,567,943 people worldwide have had COVID-19.  Forty percent of that is just under a hundred million.  In the US, those numbers are 46,502,517 and about eighteen and a half million.  Only four states have a population of more than eighteen and a half million.

So the fifth largest state in the US will be completely populated by people who will probably qualify as disabled and will have trouble getting and keeping a job, because of neurological and physical issues resulting from their - possibly asymptomatic - cases of COVID-19.

The only good news is that we don't know how long a case of long COVID lasts.  It hasn't been long enough to do the necessary research.  If everyone gets over it in a year, I guess that's a consolation.

So: the new world.  Endemic COVID and long COVID.  Long-term victims of a virus that will continue to produce long-term victims.  No wonder no one wants to write about the "end" of the pandemic.  

Watching Africa

It turns out that one thing the new world will contain, to my surprise and everyone's delight, is a vaccine for malaria.  “The World Health Organization has recommended the widespread rollout of the first malaria vaccine, in a move experts hope could save tens of thousands of children’s lives each year across Africa.”

Most of us are not familiar with the cost of malaria, almost exclusively paid by the children of Africa.  After a very long life of reading non-fiction, I know only that it is a subtle horror, transmitted by mosquitoes, that sucks the vitality and promise out of generation after generation of Africans.

Wikipedia tells us:

When properly treated, people with malaria can usually expect a complete recovery. However, severe malaria can progress extremely rapidly and cause death within hours or days. In the most severe cases of the disease, fatality rates can reach 20%, even with intensive care and treatment.  Over the longer term, developmental impairments have been documented in children who have suffered episodes of severe malaria. Chronic infection without severe disease can occur in an immune-deficiency syndrome associated with a decreased responsiveness to Salmonella bacteria and the Epstein–Barr virus.

During childhood, malaria causes anaemia during a period of rapid brain development, and also direct brain damage resulting from cerebral malaria. Some survivors of cerebral malaria have an increased risk of neurological and cognitive deficits, behavioural disorders, and epilepsy. Malaria prophylaxis was shown to improve cognitive function and school performance in clinical trials when compared to placebo groups.

Over 400,000 people died of malaria in 2019, the vast majority of them in Africa.  And over 270,000 of them were children under five years old.  Children can become re-infected quickly - often as many as four times in a season - and many of those who survive are likely to suffer neurologic damage and cognitive difficulties for the rest of their lives.

So that's what's at stake.  Give a precise regimen of anti-malarial medications plus the vaccine, "there was a 70% reduction in hospitalisation or death."  What could a few generations of genuinely healthy Africans achieve in the new world?

And isn't it ironic that a vaccine for this one-continent, parasitic disease, that has been 30 years in the making, may change the landscape of the new world in a more significant way than our miracle COVID vaccines that will eventually overcome the pandemic?

I can't wait to watch Africa for the next decade.

And Some Good News

And now, perhaps some unalloyed good news.  It looks like, in the new world, if you can't make antibodies, then antibodies will come to you.

As we all (should) know by now, vaccines have worked by introducing a safe measure of the disease into our bloodstreams, and our immune system has produced antibodies to fight it.  The antibodies stick around for however long they stick around, and then we get another vaccination.  When the real disease invades us, as my doctor said today, "Surprise!  We're ready for you!"  

It seems that there are a group of people who are immunocompromised enough that their immune system is not strong enough to produce a therapeutic level of antibodies.  But today, AstraZenaca has requested emergency use authorization (EUA) from US regulatory bodies for a new drug - AZD7442 - that has been shown in studies to prevent COVID in folks who can't make their own antibodies from a vaccine.

While vaccines rely on an intact immune system to develop targeted antibodies and infection-fighting cells, AZD7442 contains lab-made antibodies designed to linger in the body for months to contain the virus in case of an infection.

AZD7442 has been shown to be 77% effective (which isn't bad overall; we've been spoiled by the 90%+ effectiveness of COVID vaccines) in "reducing the risk of people developing any COVID-19 symptoms."

Pretty good.  If your immune system isn't strong enough for vaccines to do any good, we've got a pill for you!  It can also be used as a booster in certain situations.  

The vision of COVID as endemic in the new world continues to develop.  There may be reason for cautious optimism regarding the impact it will have on our lives in the future.

Good News/Bad News

The good news is that there's good news.  The bad news is that I don't believe it.  Or, more accurately, I don't believe that it will last.

Two articles I've read recently have great news about the new world.  One focuses on the economy.  It features the most naively hyperbolic headline I've seen in a long time:  "America Fought the Pandemic Economy - And Won."  No exclamation point, so that's a blessing.  And it's in Axios, so - a pinch of salt.

We're told that there have been great gains made in employment, wages and household wealth.  "Stimulus checks lifted nearly 12 million Americans out of poverty, according to new census data this week. Government programs also saved millions of people from losing their health insurance, even as millions lost their jobs." 

All great stuff.  But this was predictable and predicted.  A quick and unsurprising recovery from a very unusual recession (I always wondered if we should have another name for it) brought about by a return to consuming and an array of Federal and state stimuli and other financial assistance achieved their goal:  to get through the pandemic without completely wrecking the economy.

Axios' assumption (in the construction of the headline) that the pandemic is over notwithstanding, this is an incomplete picture, at least as regards the definition of the new world.  There is no evidence that any of these economic markers will continue in the positive direction they've taken so far.  Every one of them is artificially supported, and as soon as the stimulus checks stop coming, the rent moratoria all expire, as well as the temporary healthcare supports, and the labor market settles down (thus allowing corporations to once again easily fill positions paying less than a living wage), it'll look a lot like 2019.  So - let's wait a year or two to see where we actually are.

The second piece lets us know that "a new UCLA-led study decisively confirms findings of research published earlier this year, which found that American values, attitudes and activities had changed dramatically during the COVID-19 pandemic."  Those changes have apparently affected a wide variety of our social functioning:

For example, according to the survey, people said that compared with pre-pandemic times, they are now more likely to be growing and preparing their own food, conserving resources, demonstrating less interest in financial wealth and showing greater appreciation for their elders. The researchers found all of those shifts are a function of Americans' increased focus on survival and their isolation during the pandemic.*

The study also found that during the pandemic parents expected their children to help out around the home—for example, by cooking for the family—more than they did before the pandemic.

Wow.  Without knowing it, out of nowhere, we're becoming good people!  Who knew?  Time to check the research methodology.

The earlier research (Februrary of 2021) relied on "Google searches and phrases posted on Twitter, blogs and internet forums." Dr. Greenfield's current research "is based on a survey of 2,092 Americans—about half in California and half in Rhode Island."

Ah.  Social media and a survey. No direct observation of behavior, or analysis of outcomes or nationwide trends.  Research done without having to leave your office.  

To be fair, the authors note that these characteristics will "shift back to pre-2020 norms once the pandemic is more fully under control. But they note that might not be true for people in their 20s and younger, whose values are likely to be more permanently shaped by the events of the past two years."  So maybe there's some hope after all.

 Unfortunately, neither of these findings are likely to tell us much about the new world, as great as they sound.  We've still got a long way to go.

 * - The author, Dr. Patricia Greenfield of UCLA, senior author of both studies, compares these qualities to "those found in small, isolated villages with low life expectancy—such as an isolated Mayan village in Chiapas, Mexico, that she has studied since 1969."  The common factor?  The aforementioned "increased focus on survival," and isolation.

News from the Anti-Viral Front

I was very surprised to learn today that we may be just months away from an anti-viral treatment for COVID-19 - a pill that could reduce or eliminate the symptoms, both mild and severe, of the virus.  This is, apparently, not a surprise to those who understand the world of viruses, because anti-viral medications are already playing a big role in our healthcare landscape:

“Oral antivirals have the potential to not only curtail the duration of one’s Covid-19 syndrome, but also have the potential to limit transmission to people in your household if you are sick,” said Timothy Sheahan, a virologist at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill who has helped pioneer the therapies.

Antivirals are already essential treatments for other viral infections, including hepatitis C and HIV. One of the best known is Tamiflu, the widely prescribed pill that can shorten the duration of influenza and reduce the risk of hospitalization if it is given quickly.

I was not familiar with Tamiflu, although the fact that I've never had a serious case of the flu may have something to do with that.  And I keep reading that AIDS is a virus and is treated with an anti-viral, and I keep forgetting.

So now, encouraging news about a COVID anti-viral - by Christmas?  The new year?

At least three promising antivirals for Covid are being tested in clinical trials,* with results expected as soon as late fall or winter, said Carl Dieffenbach, director of the Division of AIDS at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who is overseeing antiviral development.

“I think that we will have answers as to what these pills are capable of within the next several months,” Dieffenbach said.

So - to our short list of things we are pretty sure we'll find in the new world, we can add a medication that will effectively treat COVID - if taken early in the course of the infection.  

This is good news for those of us medically vulnerable folks who are looking ahead to the world of endemic COVID.  If the COVID vaccine can be included in our annual flu shot, and we have medication that will reduce the symptoms and limit transmission, maybe we can upgrade our picture of post-pandemic life.

 * = Here are the study details.

The New World is Not an Island; It's a World

Here's something that's true about the reporting on the pandemic and, specifically, the "end" of the pandemic:  the stories are just about the United States.  When the phrase "the end of the pandemic" is used, it actually means "the end of conditions in the United States which remind us that there's a pandemic, and the beginning of conditions which have some resemblance to normal life."  Using this understanding, we can see the "end" of the pandemic, anywhere between late 2021 and mid-2022.  However, long after we've declared, victory, the pandemic will still be raging in the rest of the world, with a non-zero chance of raging right back here with some new variant.

However, that doesn't mean that there's nothing of interest in this kind of reporting.  Researchers at Penn State are "co-coordinating" work by a consortium of researchers who are, in turn, consulting with the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).  The “COVID-19 Scenario Modeling Hub"* has combined nine different research projections, using mathematical models, and we are told -

The most likely scenario is that children age 5 to 11 will be approved for vaccination and that no new superspreading variant will emerge... In this case, by March 2022, COVID-19 infections across the United States could slowly and steadily drop from about 140,000 per day today to about 9,000 per day, and deaths could decline from about 1,500 per day today to fewer than 100 per day.

As I've said elsewhere (and don't remember where), we won't know we're at the end of the pandemic unless we have a definition of what that means.  In this case, that means "fewer than 100" deaths per day.  You can pick a number below 100 and do the math, but the higher of those numbers brings us within the range of the historic annual death toll from the just plain normal flu.  

So we'll know we've reached the new world - and this will be, apparently, next March - when COVID is killing about as many of us as flu has in the past.  Assuming that the just plain normal flu will continue to kill us (the upcoming flu season is being described as "severe"), that in the new world, some kind of flu will be killing twice as many of us as some kind of flu did before COVID.

All of which assumes, of course, that the pandemic in the rest of the world will not intrude on our pandemic-free haven.  Sounds like a mirage to me, and a new world that I'd prefer to move through on the way to a truly healthy world world.

 * = Don't follow this link unless you know all the statistical jargon.

Public Service

I've gone way too long without acknowledging Annie Laurie, at Balloon Juice, who has, nearly every day for a year and a half, put up an extensive post with COVID updates from around the world.  It shows up around oh-dark-thirty every morning, and if you only read one COVID post on a regular basis, this should be it.

Thanks, AL!

Lookout report

No sign of land yet.

Follow the link to stay up-to-date on the progress toward the new world.

The Social Office

Remember WFH?*  I have no intention of trying to solve this problem - mostly because it is still a problem, in that no one seems able to predict what percentage of workers who can will be working from home once we have become comfortably ensconced in the world of endemic COVID, which, it seems, will be how we know the pandemic is over.

This seems like a pretty simple issue, but it has become about as complex as possible.  Kevin Drum has weighed in again (be sure to read the comments), as has Ed Zitron (ditto).  The New York Times has something to say, as well, but that article is almost universally an object of scorn, especially among those who feel that managers who insist that WFHers return to the office are playing out a capitalist agenda which has nothing to do with their employees' efficiency or, heaven forbid, satisfaction.  Lots is being written, but I'll let you find it yourself.

What I have to add to the debate involves social skills.  Like so many "statistics" and "studies," approaches to studying the effects of WFH treat all remote workers the same, as if there were no differences among them as regards characteristics which are essential to understanding what is happening.

And a "characteristic which is essential to understanding" is the individual's social skills, and therefor their comfort with socialization.  Working in an office requires that the employee exhibit countless different social skills in the hundreds of personal interactions that occur each day, from passing someone in the hall to the hour and a half of "networking time" before a conference starts.  Some are naturally good at this; some are not.**  Those of us in the second group find those interactions stressful, because we're not sure we're going to be able to behave successfully in enough of them to stay out of trouble.

So the second group - those who are not good at these interactions - have been ecstatic about WFH, and would like to keep at it until the end of the universe.  This, of course, will come as a surprise to noone.

However, I wonder:  are those who are socially adept more likely to become managers because of those skills?  "It's not what you know, but who you know" refers, I think, to schmoozing and networking.  Those who can do it best get noticed, and promoted.

So are the managers who are advocating the return to the office really just lonely?  Their preferred environment was disassembled a year and a half ago, and they have spent the time planning to rebuild it.  

Add to this the possibility that these managers, who have found such success by being like they be, don't understand that it's a skill they've been blessed with, and that others in the office - good workers, productive, reliable - have not been blessed with those skills and really, really don't want to help them rebuild their social environment.

What do you think?  Where do you fall on the social distribution, and how do you feel about WFH?  

 * - Work From Home.  I know.  It's been a long time.

 ** - Those of you who are saying, "What skills?  You just go to work and interact with people normally!  What are you talking about?" are in the first group.

Behave Differently

COVAX notwithstanding, we are behaving the way we have always behaved:

We will not reach the new world until we have learned to behave differently.

Boost?

If the road to the new world goes through booster shots, then the new world will be further away than it is now.  Right now, every booster shot in a first world arm is a shot that is not in a third world arm.  Africa's vaccination rate is three percent.  Over a billion Africans remain unvaccinated.  Every shot that goes somewhere other than into an un-fully-vaccinated arm will make the pandemic longer and more people will die.

It's like those awful moral choice games people play - the train full of people, the bridge, and your son, for instance.  My first impulse was to refuse the booster until Africa is 70% vaccinated, but that's beginning to feel a little hyperbolic.  What do you think?  Booster or not, and why?

More Patience

 

Just how long do you expect this plague to go on?

                                                                                                   The New Yorker, August 30

As we know, the plague referenced in the cartoon is still with us - it "went on" indefinitely.  There have been three major outbreaks - pandemics - including one on the 20th century.  

Abbey and I were startled, to say the least, last Sunday when the pastor announced, "COVID is over!"  Turns out he was celebrating the possibility of a women's conference in November, which will, if all goes well, be held under pre-COVID rules.  As for us, however, we still had our masks on.

As you know, I find it hard to resist the temptation to read any article with a title like "When Will the COVID-19 Pandemic End?"  This time, it was by McKinsey & Co., a wide-spectrum management consulting firm, and their take on the end of the pandemic - the arrival of the new world! - is extensive and comprehensive.

We've talked and read a lot about the endemic future of COVID, as a general concept, but what will it look like?  Well, it may look like "shifting the focus of public-health efforts from managing case counts to managing severe illnesses and deaths."  Singapore is heading down that road now.  

It will also include conversations about what level of risk we are willing to live with indefinitely.  To assist us in this conversation, we are presented with data regarding the "normal flu" that we've lived with all our lives; as we noted last time, it is not a benign disease.  In fact, the the US, there was a period of time this spring when COVID deaths and hospitalizations were occurring at a lower level than the ten-year average for deaths and hospitalizations for flu.  Here's some data for those who need it (you know who you are):

The graphs of flu hospitalizations and deaths are straight lines because they are a ten-year average, not discrete data points.

So we see that, if we can get the pandemic back to a point similar to where most places in the US were this spring, we may have an endemic equilibrium that we can live with.  Especially given that those of us who are vaccinated have a significantly lower chance of serious illness from COVID than we do from regular flu.  One way to look at it:  from the perspective of a vaccinated person, once the really scary waves in the unvaccinated states burn out, life should be able to go back to normal, although we probably won't be able to put our masks in mothballs.  For those who choose to remain unvaccinated - well, who knows.

McKinsey & Co. suggests that, given this perspective, the shift from pandemic to endemic management may take place as soon as the fourth quarter of 2021, and be complete in the first quarter of 2022, at least in many developed Western countries.  

So - the new world isn't in sight, but there seem to be rumors - actually, pretty credible stories - that we're heading in sort of the right direction.  Patience - and get the vax and wear your mask. 

Our Familiar Endemic Flu

And as a counterpoint to the previous post, let's look at this tweet, the crux of which is that the normal flu has been endemic for all of our lives, and most of us never even think of it much.  Some of us get a flu shot (me, last year and going forward) or don't (me, before last year).  I'm assuming that in the typical year, most of us don't get the flu.  I've gotten it, I think, once in living memory.  "Actions are regularly taken by health depts & hospitals. You just don’t notice them because our threshold for action is low enough to allow those actions to be hyper-targeted."

I was surprised to learn that between 12,000 and 61,000 (2010-2019) Americans die of flu - normal flu - every year.  I don't know why it varies so much, but it probably has something to do with which variants show up each year, and whether that year's flu shot ends up being effective against them.  So it's a bigger deal than I thought.

But still... life has gone on without most people thinking about the flu at all.  Will that be the case in the new world, regarding COVID?   Over 60% of children in America and around 45% of adults got a flu shot each year before COVID, and in the last year, those numbers have gone up.  As time goes on, all the available COVID vaccines will win permanent approval (or fall by the wayside), and, one may only hope, the political polarization that keeps a large minority of Americans unvaccinated will fade from consciousness as the years go by.  The pandemic may, as one if its benefits, result in higher levels of vaccinations for all kinds of flu, which is good for individuals and for the herd itself.  Will COVID vax be integrated into your flu shot in years to come?  Early results suggest, maybe so!

Stay tuned.

One View of the New World

 “Aw, look at all these photos of us wearing masks, 

back when we were all able to live aboveground.”

                                                                                                     The New Yorker, August 27, 2021

A Big Miracle

After clearing up an error that "mispoke" six months of our lives, on Monday Dr. Anthony Fauci asserted that we could find "a degree of normality" in the spring of 2022 (not the fall, he assures us, but the spring).  That's two full years, for those of you who are counting.  How will that happen?  "An overwhelming majority" of the 90 million Americans who are unvaccinated today, need to get the shot.  

So - we begin in August of 2021, with wide swaths of the country - whole states - proclaimed as hot spots, schools closed, ICU's turning away patients.  90 million Americans adamantly refusing to give up their right to refuse this particular vaccination.

                                  

And in eight months, everyone's vaccinated and we can eat in a restaurant again.

I don't know.  If that's what it takes, we'll need a pretty big miracle.

The new world continues on hold.

What "Endemic" Looks Like "Now"

Back again!  After a really cool mini-vacation in the Hudson River School, then a lot of work, and then a visit from son, daughter-in-law, and The World's Cutest Grandbaby (who didn't sleep one night and so was a little less than cute), The New World is back.

Back in the new world, or at least talking about the new world which may, someday, emerge.  Just in time for Ed Yong's article in the Atlantic, with a compelling title:  "How The Pandemic Now Ends."  It seems like we've passed through a succession of "now"s, and this is the latest one.  

This "now" is the result (I'm sure you will not be surprised) of the Delta variant.  It is also the result of a fundamental change in how we see vaccinations.  "Vaccines remain the best way for individuals to protect themselves, but societies cannot treat vaccines as their only defense."  This is different.  The more we learn about breakthrough infections, the more it is clear that the virus, and especially Delta, can spread through the vaccinated population as well as the unvaccinated (although much more ineffectively.  Still.)

So we return to the concept of "endemic," which we discussed as long ago as May of this year.  There was general agreement among epidemiologists at that time, but Delta has sealed the deal.  I think it's worth reproducing a whole paragraph from the Atlantic article:

This means that the “zero COVID” dream of fully stamping out the virus is a fantasy. Instead, the pandemic ends when almost everyone has immunity, preferably because they were vaccinated or alternatively because they were infected and survived. When that happens, the cycle of surges will stop and the pandemic will peter out. The new coronavirus will become endemic—a recurring part of our lives like its four cousins that cause common colds. It will be less of a problem, not because it has changed but because it is no longer novel and people are no longer immunologically vulnerable. Endemicity was always the likely outcome... but likely is now unavoidable. “Before, it still felt possible that a really concerted effort could get us to a place where COVID-19 almost didn’t exist anymore,” Murray told me. “But Delta has changed the game.”

He goes on to talk about the average person getting COVID pretty much the same way we get a cold, and then living with the discomfort, getting over it, and moving on.  People who are vaccinated will, on the average (which does not guarantee anything for you or me), find their experience less intense. 

Yong doesn't talk about long COVID, except briefly, peripherally, and I think this is a blemish on what is generally a comprehensive and useful picture of our present and future.  And it leaves a question that must be addressed:  why would we reduce our mitigation efforts - ever - if we don't want the lifelong sentence of long COVID?  A cold comes and goes.  COVID can be forever.  We need a new definition of "endemic," and a new way of living in a world that can condemn us to pain and discomfort for a very long time.

Control and Ego?

I hoped not to come back to WFH for a little while, because I suppose everyone's heard enough about it for the moment, and then I stumbled across this piece in the Atlantic, by Ed Zitron (more on him in a moment) that made me sit up and take notice.

It's got a compelling title:  "Why Managers Fear a Remote-Work Future."  We've seen a lot of opposition to extending WFH indefinitely, from titans of industry to middle managers.  Here's the point he's making: 

Remote work lays bare many brutal inefficiencies and problems that executives don’t want to deal with because they reflect poorly on leaders and those they’ve hired. Remote work empowers those who produce and disempowers those who have succeeded by being excellent diplomats and poor workers, along with those who have succeeded by always finding someone to blame for their failures. It removes the ability to seem productive (by sitting at your desk looking stressed or always being on the phone), and also, crucially, may reveal how many bosses and managers simply don’t contribute to the bottom line.

Zitron is saying that  when everyone's remote, the only way to assess the value of an employee to the company is to examine the amount and quality of work produced.   "Remote work makes who does and doesn’t actually do work way more obvious."  When everyone is working from home, those who have gotten by on personality, and drama, and learning how to "look busy," have nothing to show for their days.  Oh, and also:  when everyone's at home, there's almost no room for "control and ego." 

Zitron makes the point that has been obvious to us who have been paying attention, that there are no good reasons to ship everyone back to the office.  There is no evidence that "workplace culture" or "face-to-face collegiality" or "the efficiency of working in the same room" has any effect on the bottom line.  They are phrases that are mouthed by those who are fearful that they will no longer be needed in a "culture" based on quality and quantity of work produced.

There is little doubt that WFH will be one of the more interesting developments in the new world.  Whether it develops naturally, and boosts productivity and worker happiness (and reduces traffic congestion and hydrocarbon burning), or whether it is squeezed out by those who need control and ego, and to avoid seeming redundant, only time will tell, as they say.  

ADDENDUM:  Even if you're only a little interested in this topic, I think Zitron's "tech and culture newsletter" is worth your time.  Thoughtful, and no punches pulled.

Accepted and Acceptable

...and so, being perverse, I Googled "When will the pandemic end?" and this came up right at the top:  "The End of the COVID-19 Pandemic."  Written by an ethicist. Published yesterday, by the University of Oxford, in a journal called Practical Ethics, which is such a great title that when I'm done with this post I'm going to go ahead and read more of it.

Before I go on, I'm asking you to just read all of the article.  It's short, it's concise, it's comprehensive, it's interesting. I'll probably do some kind of summary, but this article is rich enough to get us to stop and think down a whole bunch of new pathways.

We know the pandemic began on March 11, 2020, because the WHO told us so.*  But when does it end?   According to the authors, Alberto Giubilini and Erica Charters, "Historically, epidemics end not with the end of the disease,** but with the disease becoming endemic – that is, accepted and acceptable as part of normal life."

As you can imagine, this is the part of the article that stopped me in my tracks.  "Accepted and acceptable."  What will it take to get used to that?

The article has a lot more to say, mostly about how we decide when the pandemic is over:

If the end requires societal, cultural, and political agreement on what is a ‘locally acceptable level’ of disease, discussions should include input from those who specialise in understanding society, culture, and politics.  Such discussions will necessarily involve articulating social priorities and cultural values, and calculating risks and benefits, alongside epidemiological data.  Such discussions must therefore involve experts beyond the fields of medicine – ethicists, philosophers, and historians, as well as anthropologists, sociologists, economists, and political scientists.

And they've all got to agree on an end date; as you can imagine, much will change when the pandemic is officially over.  For instance, "AstraZeneca is distributing its vaccines at cost, with no profit, until the pandemic ends."  They'll want to know date and time.

There's a lot to think about in here.  How would you approach the question, as a historian?  a sociologist?  Or an ethicist?

But here's what I'll be thinking about:  "accepted and acceptable as part of normal life."  As part of my normal life?

We'll see.

 * - There were many, including me and a lot of other lay dilettantes, who thought, "Well, it's about time!"  To be fair (to us), cases had appeared in 114 countries by that point.

 ** - Only smallpox, of all the diseases inflicted on mankind, has been completely eradicated.  This includes the bubonic plague which, like all the other endemic diseases (in other words, all of them except smallpox), has become "accepted and acceptable as part of normal life."

Scurvy and Storms

I know, I know.  I'm not even going to look at the date of the last post.  I've been focused on a trip west that turned out a little differently than planned, and now that I'm back home, I find myself just entirely exhausted and, to be honest, a little depressed about politics - which up until recently, was the air I breathed - and life in general during... what?  The Pandemic That Never Ended?  The Oh, Look - It's The Consequences of Someone Else's Behavior?  [John Goodman racks slide] Am I The Only One Around Here Who Remembers Human Decency?

Sorry.  

The most proximate stimulus for a new post was an e-mail I got today, from Larry, our tour boss at Hyde Hall, a 200 year old English Country House outside of Cooperstown, where I am a docent/site interpreter/tour guide.  It seems it is time to mask up again.  All staff are vaccinated (required), as are most guests, but from today on everyone - staff and guests - will be wearing masks when inside.  Our tours begin at the Visitor's Center, which is, of course, inside, and then they go up to the house which, of course, is inside.  

This is not necessarily the worst thing that could happen.  The rest of the staff did it this way all last year, a year during which I took a "I don't want to get it" sabbatical.  But I'm so tired of this.  I do the job because I love it, and I get paid just over minimum wage, so, man, I do not want to argue with some moron who has rights and won't wear a mask. 

I'm sure we'll do fine.  I love showing off the house, and I really like all the folks I work with.  We'll get through it, I guess, as long as there's an end somewhere up ahead.

Which, of course, reminds me of the point of writing this blog.  I started with a voyage of discovery, on Columbus's ship the "Santa Maria," wondering what the new world would be like, after we were done with the virus.  I kept that going as long as I could, but really, the crew has all died of scurvy and the ghostly ships have gone down in one storm or another.  The Admiral of the Ocean Sea is a distant memory, a throwback to more innocent times, when we knew that persistence and a little heroism would pull us through in no time.

There may be no new world - it may be endless ocean, forever.  

Either way, I'll be looking for what other people say about the road ahead, and reporting back.

More WFH and Traffic

More about the effect of pandemic-based WFH on traffic patterns, and speculation regarding whether the changes are permanent.

Wejo is an outfit that is "reimagining the world we live in with connected vehicle data."  The fact that "connected vehicle data" sounds like something I'd really like to know a lot more about tells you all you need to know about me.

USA Today summarizes* some of Wejo's recent reporting on rush hour:

While Americans are gradually getting back to some semblance of normal, traffic data suggests that the morning drive has changed drastically – and it may never go back to pre-COVID-19 patterns.

In short, rush-hour traffic is more spread out and, generally, has shifted later in the morning as Americans are more able to avoid heavy traffic periods due to remote work...

To be sure, as the pandemic continues to subside, many Americans are expected to return to the office after Labor Day, likely increasing overall traffic volumes. But traffic experts expect that increasingly flexible work arrangements are likely to give many Americans the ability to avoid the old-fashioned blitz to the workplace altogether.

“The morning rush hour has gotten later and it’s gotten flatter,” says Daniel Tibble, director of data science and analytics for Wejo. “In almost all scenarios, traffic is not dropping as much in the later hours and is dropping more in the earlier hours.”

So rush hour seems to be changing, and for the good:  "flatter" means spread out, reducing congestion.

Whether this is permanent depends on the Great WFH Debate:  will there be a significant increase in people working from home after the pandemic is over (whatever "over" means)?  There will be impacts well beyond traffic:  commercial real estate and associated restaurants and other businesses; car and especially gas sales; family dynamics; population density (what happens when suddenly a whole lot of people can live wherever they want?), and etcetera.

Labor Day seems to be the point on the calendar when many businesses will be expecting their WFH staff to be coming back, so we've got a couple of months to see what happens.  Should be interesting.

 

 * - Poorly.

It's Not Over

We share our time between homes in rural New York and rural Massachusetts.  When we congregate, it is always with people who are vaccinated.  So for us, it would be very easy to slip into a post-pandemic lifestyle, to assume our place in a new world that is very much like the old one.

We also read the news, and it is often jarring, here in our healthy havens.

• There were "record numbers of infections in Australia and South Korea" this week.  Record numbers.
• Each day for the last three days, Thailand broke the record for COVID deaths.
• Indonesia has reported record numbers of cases on seven of the last eleven days.  On Thursday, a record number of Indonesians died.  A year ago, Business Wire noted that only 5% of Indonesian hospital beds are equipped to provide intensive care services.
• Vast numbers of Australians who were caught overseas when the pandemic struck are still not home, and may not get home for a long time:  Australia is tightening its lockdown, and fewer people - any people - will be allowed in the country going forward.  Believe it or not, only 8% of Australians are vaccinated.
• Each of the last four days, The Moscow Times reported a new daily record for Russians dying from COVID.
• The Euro 2020 soccer championships look like they will be super spreader events.  40% of Finland's cases are apparently traceable to soccer fans returning from games in Russia.
• And here in America, 273 people died of COVID yesterday.  Yesterday.  On that same day, 14,875 Americans learned that they had COVID.  Twenty percent of them had the delta variant.  In the UK, 39,438 Britons learned they had COVID, and nearly all of them - 92.3% - have the delta variant.
• Also in America:  You've heard of the variants, and especially the delta variant, and you've heard of anti-vaxxers.  Those two things tend more and more to be found together:  hotspots.  The Federal Government is sending mobile vaccination labs to those hotspots, because the pandemic isn't over.

The pandemic isn't over.  That land we thought we saw, or saw evidence of?  It was mangled by marauders and wiped clean by hurricanes and no longer exists.  Just branches and leaves in the water.  The birds seem confused.  We're caught in a storm, and the compass was swept overboard.

It's not over.  The new world is nowhere to be seen.

Colds in The New World

I got a COVID test this morning, because - the new world.

I have, throughout my long life, gotten a cold maybe once every year or two.  Nothing unusual:  it comes; you deal with it; it goes.  Never thought of missing work or sending out notifications.

I've had a persistent cough for a month or so which feels exactly like an old fashioned cold.  In the last few days, the cough has gotten more persistent.  Nothing new.  Except how I felt I had to handle it.

First, I called the doctor's office, because, for the first time ever, I wanted to know what it was.  Still waiting to hear, so no joy there.

I have one remaining post-post-retirement job, which involves working with a small group of colleagues at a historic mansion north of Cooperstown and leading tours of the mansion.  I certainly didn't want to spend the day coughing all over everyone, and watching folks edge away from me all day, even if I did exercise good cough discipline ("Cough into your elbow!" says my wife who worked with preschoolers for fifteen years).

So this morning I got a COVID test.  Because I have a cold.  The test came back negative.  I e-mailed everyone who works with me and outlined the plan, which is:  I'll go to work tomorrow and wear a mask all day.  At the beginning of each tour, I'll let the guests know that I have a cold and, by the way, tested negative yesterday.  I have the proof, printed out, in my pocket, if anyone would like to see it.  Then we'll start the tour.

If COVID really does become endemic (thanks, anti-vaxxers!), this may be the way we handle colds in the new world.  

In Which I Almost Disagree With a Blogger Whom I Admire

 Kevin Drum is at it again.  To wit:

And while we're on the topic, can we please, once and for all, give up on the "COVID has changed life forever" genre? It hasn't. It's already obvious that things will return almost completely to normal over the next few months and that the experience of living through a pandemic has neither enriched our lives nor taught us to cherish our friends and neighbors even more. All it's done is make us cranky.

Thanks again.  If Kevin's right, this whole blog has been a waste of time, sort of.  That's not his fault, of course, but... sheesh.

"And while we're on the topic..."  What topic?  This apocolyptic quote comes from a post describing the changes in traffic speed on the northbound 405 freeway which runs near his house in Irvine, Orange County, outside of Los Angeles, California.  Lower speeds are bad, because that indicates traffic jams.  Speeds improved during the pandemic which, I suppose, is over in California.  Now Kevin notes that they're back to normal:

Looks to me like the traffic jams are two hours shorter now than in June of 2019.  Maybe the pandemic isn't over in California?  Or maybe....  Nah.   Never mind.  It can't possibly be that even one person who was commuting to an office in 2019 might have found a way to work from home permanently - and therefore no longer contributes to traffic on the 405.  Couldn't be.

'Loss Of Grey Matter' Is Probably a Bad Thing

For some reason, an outfit called BioBank scanned over 40,000 brains in the three years previous to the outbreak of the pandemic.  There's a story there somewhere, but not that I could find, even though I looked hard.

At any rate, some clinicians in the UK recently reported on a study wherein they re-scanned 394 of those folks, all of whom had contracted and survived COVID-19, and compared the before and after.  They also compared the re-scans to 388 previously-scanned subjects who did not contract COVID-19.

Guess what?  Yep.  "We identified significant effects of COVID-19 in the brain with a loss of grey matter..."  Most of the brain cell loss was in the "gustatory and olfactory" regions - the parts of the brain that control the sense of smell and the sense of taste.  They also found "loss of grey matter" in other areas of the brain.

The neurologists found little difference between the effects of mild and severe cases of COVID.  So if I'm reading this correctly, a consequence of being infected with the virus is a loss of brain cells.  Not a cute inability to smell or taste for a couple of days, but permanently dead brain cells - which are famously unable to reproduce themselves, and so when you lose them, they stay lost.

Around the world, about 164 million people have gotten, and survived, COVID-19 up to this point.  If this study is accurate (and, of course, "more research needs to be done," etc., etc.), hundreds of millions of people will emerge from this pandemic with permanent brain injury.  The effects apparently range from severe to mild, and it's "only" in the taste and smell centers, but - permanent brain damage.

This is a blog about the new world - what it might be like - and so we need to acknowledge that this is one of the things that the new world might be like.  But I think we also have an opportunity to say, again, "Don't get it."  It's not a joke, a hoax, a mere inconvenience.  Stay safe.  Get vaccinated. 

Geez.

A Coupla Things

A couple of things that would not, on their own, merit a post.  Not because they're not interesting; I think if they were verifiable and included lots of data and numbers, they'd stand alone.  As it is, they're anecdotal.  So - grain of salt.

But more importantly, both stories suggest that the pandemic has nudged some of us a little bit toward what Maslow calls self-actualization - the fulfillment of our potential and our satisfaction with who we are.  But I'll let you be the judge.

First, to follow up on the previous post, regarding jobs and businesses.  Axios summarizes a survey by Prudential Financial that suggests that as many as one quarter of the workforce will be looking for a new job once the economy settles down and employment becomes less risky.  The World Economic Forum tells us that "up to 40% of employees are thinking of quitting their jobs."  Why?

• Some workers may believe they need to change jobs to get a better grip on work-life balance or find a place where they feel more connected.
• Nearly half of employees surveyed by Prudential said they feel disconnected to their companies after a year of working remotely, partly because they are missing the benefits of interacting with people outside their teams and getting "face time" with higher-ups in the office. This "culture decay" can lead people to be more likely to hop to a new employer.

A year or more away from the focused stress of the office has been revealing to many.  

"University of Michigan economist Betsey Stevenson tells Axios, "People have had a little more space to ask themselves, 'Is this really what I want to be doing?'" So some are deciding they want to work fewer hours or with more flexibility to create more time for family or hobbies."

Imagine that.  When people had no choice but to balance life, family and work, many of them kind of liked it.  Who could have predicted that?  Many don't want to work for a company which forbids WFH; over 80% in the Prudential study said they would prefer to be able to work from home at least one day a week.  For more reading, the World Economic Forum article goes down some interesting rabbit holes.

Secondly:  You may remember the post on hair.  At that point (oh, the innocence!), July 2020, we thought the pandemic was waning and things were opening up (very prematurely, as it turns out).  Men whose haircut-every-two-weeks-forever routine had been disrupted, were getting haircuts again, after months of not doing so.  And some were liking the long look, and deciding to keep it.

In a footnote at the end I noted, "I have no idea how this plays out for women in hair salons."  Well, now I do.

In a strangely moving, and beautifully photographed article in The New Yorker, we meet a dozen or so women who have been coloring their hair since the first grey appeared - and then, during the last year, with stylists and beauty parlors out of business, the grey grew in.  And they liked it.

I say it was moving because I have a sense of what grey hair can mean to a woman's self-concept, from conversations overheard during a long life.  These women have chosen to embrace it - to acknowledge greying and the aging it represents - many with a palpable sense of joy.  See that in the mirror?  That's me!  Me!  

An 80 year old woman who had never shown her grey says,

“When I did have a hairdresser to cut my hair, she said, ‘Don’t you want to do the color?’ I said, ‘Finished. No more.’ I’m very happy.”

"I'm very happy."  And that's your good news for the day.

Good News, of a Sort

Blogger, which cradles this blog in its digital bosom, has a pretty good search function, as long as you use just one word - no phrases.  Last I looked, there have been 185 "The New World" posts, and no, I am not going to read each one.  I use the search bar (upper left - try it!  It's fun!).  I've been able to find what I needed - up until today.  

I recently came across an article about the number of businesses that have closed permanently because of the pandemic.  I know I wrote a post on that very topic last year.  There were numbers.  But I can't find it, so I can't do any comparison.  You're free to search for it yourself, and if you find it, could you let me know?

Anyway, the Business Insider tells us that in a normal year (i.e.: not 2020) about 600,000 businesses close permanently in the US (and I had to look elsewhere to find that about the same number of business are created in the same time period).  However, in this non-normal year-and-change, an extra 200,000 businesses - above and beyond the normal 600,000 - have closed, never to open again.

This is actually a good thing, according to the Federal Reserve, who provided the numbers.  Projections had actually been much higher, but government aid, including the PPP, has apparently made a big difference.  

Two hundred thousand is a big number, and represents many more jobs.  More math, more turmoil in people's lives.  But overall, not a huge effect on the economy, especially if we can stop dithering on the infrastructure bill and just pass it already.

I'm not going to wander into politics; economics is close enough.  I'm starting to think that the mice are right - by the end of the year (that long?) we'll all be back to normal, and the pandemic will begin to slide into memory and myth.

Back Again

Those of you who follow this blog religiously, and find themselves wasting away to nothing when days and weeks go by without a post*, are owed an explanation.  It is new world related!

We have a rental house on Cape Cod, and so does my wife's sister, about a mile down the road.  May and June are the crunch months, in terms of getting the houses ready for summer renters.  We have the harder job, as we live in the house much or most of the winter, whereas the house down the road is shut down.  We work during the weeks and visit on the weekends; my wife's sister comes down on the weekends, enjoys the good weather, welcomes her extended family, and visits.  This year, in addition to all that, my wife's other sister and spouse, and her cousin and two adult children, also came to visit.  Our two sons, one daughter-in-law, and The World's Cutest Grandbaby also enjoyed an extended visit.

Everyone was vaccinated**, but we met outside anyway.  Both houses have big decks.  We spent a lot of time visiting, largely because we had a lot of visiting to make up for.  We got together nearly every day the last couple of weeks, and had a grand time.  There was a lot of catching up to do.  For us, at least in our artificial bubble, the pandemic was over; we were living in the new world.

So between the visiting, and the long lists of jobs and projects (including building a split rail fence and painting three decks), there has been no time for much else.  Thus the hiatus.  However, we're back, here at "The New World."  Aren't you thrilled?

 * - This is a joke.

 ** - Actually, this is not true.  The World's Cutest Grandbaby, almost 2 years old, was not vaccinated, of course.  So it turns out that our "bubble" was a great example of herd immunity - she was protected because enough of us (in our case, all of us) were immune.

Malls, or Not

Those who know me may be surprised to discover that I almost finished a PhD program, if by "almost" we mean most of the coursework and none of the thesis except the topic.  It was at the University of Texas at Austin, and to keep body and soul together, I also had a full-time job at Northcross Mall in northwest Austin; I started there by pulling weeds and mopping floors, and eventually found myself supervising the maintenance and custodial crew.  Imagine that!  

I remember being fascinated by the structure of a mall - this was in the mid-70s, when malls were, if not brand new, at least newish enough to engender some awe.  Self-contained, without real connection to the outside - I felt like I might as well be on a spaceship heading for Alpha Centuri.  I was in and out of its systems and passageways and ductwork and mechanics all the time - it was my mall.*

But enough about me.  We're going to talk a little today about the demise of malls in America.  Normally, the demise of anything exhibiting such an obsessive focus on commercial capitalism would normally make me ecstatic; however, I do have a soft spot for malls.

But they're on their way out.  Although this was true pre-COVID, the economic upheaval of the last year and a half has greatly accelerated the process.  CNN reports today that the Washington Prime Group, which owns and operates over 100 malls across America, has filed for bankruptcy - and that  CBL Properties and PREIT, organizations which own another 130 malls, did the same last year.  All three indicated that it was unpaid rent, rent forgiveness, and the bankruptcies of major tenants that led to their decision to declare bankruptcy.

All three groups will attempt to keep their 230+ malls open (which I don't understand), and the article is full of phrases that make me think that no wealthy owners will be left behind.  But still, brick and mortar stores seem to be on their way out, and the pandemic has, it seems, accelerated a troubling trend into a certainty.

More on that soon.

* - It also had a skating rink.  If you've ever seen a forgettable movie called "Honeysuckle Rose" with Willie Nelson (Texas state law requires everyone within state borders to attend anything involving Willie Nelson), the mall skating rink they dropped the ice cream cone on was my skating rink, in my mall.