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From Vox
Everyone wants forgiveness, but no one is being forgiven -
Amanda Northrop/Vox
Modern outrage is a cycle. Could a culture of public forgiveness ever break it?
The state of modern outrage is a cycle: We wake up mad, we go to bed mad, and in between, the only thing that might change is what’s making us angry. The one gesture that could offer substantive change, or at least provide a way forward — forgiveness — seems perpetually beyond our reach.
In the public sphere, we’re constantly being asked to weigh in on the question of forgiveness as a culturalprocess. The consensus thus far has largely been that American culture has no room for the concept. In a tweet from March 2021, Atlantic writer Elizabeth Bruenig wrote, “as a society we have absolutely no coherent story — none whatsoever — about how a person who’s done wrong can atone, make amends, and retain some continuity between their life/identity before and after the mistake.”
In other words, everyone wants forgiveness, but no one is being forgiven, and no one knows how to negotiate forgiveness at a cultural level. In an era of polarized politics, “cancel culture,” and the tendency of social media users to conduct informal modern tribunals without a lot of due process, seeking and granting public forgiveness is increasingly complicated.
The questions involved get harder by the day: What use is a good apology if people are unwilling to hear it? Whose forgiveness matters most? And what’s the point of agreeing on answers to any of the other questions if all we really want is to hang onto our anger, scoring points online rather than moving on?
Bound up in the hand-wringing over cancel culture is the idea that lurking on the internet is a potential vigilante justice mob, out to insist that a score must be settled and retribution must be taken. In this messy context, on such a public stage, there’s little room for humanization between offense and vengeance.
The idea of “canceling” turns every potential interaction into a bad-faith nightmare, reframing earnest calls for accountability as witch hunts and often derailing the possibility of penitence before the question of forgiveness can ever arise. Those who sound the cancel culture alarm do have some valid concerns, namely: How is anyone supposed to attain lasting forgiveness at a cultural level without having their past offenses permanently held against them? What if they don’t want your forgiveness — can you still interact with them and their work? When is it okay to move on? Is it ever?
If things are at such an impasse, is public forgiveness even a worthy goal? Perhaps not, but it is preferable to either a public figure’s summary cancellation (unlikely as that is to achieve) or a furious, endless standoff between offender and offended. In practice, rather than becoming an alternative to outrage and wariness, the idea of forgiveness can fuel just as much outrage and wariness as anything else these days.
That’s all thanks to the nature of modern outrage itself — the self-perpetuating cycle thrives on never letting go and turning every attempt at moving past it into another source of anger, another element to distrust. And so it goes: We wake up mad, we go to bed mad, rinse and repeat.
If we applied a positive road map to a typical outrage cycle, what we would hope to find after that initial period of outrage is discussion, apology, atonement, and forgiveness. That process almost never happens on the modern public stage.
Instead, far too often, a single offense becomes part of a litany of wrongs that follow the offender around the public sphere, with the long tail of their sins — imagined, real, or alleged — trailing behind them forever, ready to be brought up the next time they draw attention, leading them to endure still more damnation every time they make new mistakes. That’s all optimistically assuming we can get them to admit and apologize for the offense to begin with.
With the rise of cancel culture — or, more accurately, the rise of hysteria around the idea of a hypothetical “cancel culture” that may or may not exist — public figures, especially ones with massive platforms, have a reason to completely disengage from their critics and from whatever the issue is that may or may not be getting them canceled.
The problem starts, before any apology or even offense, with the public sphere. We seem to be incapable of handling potential opposition in good faith.
Sometimes this looks like the deliberate misinterpretation of old statements, like the intentional twisting, by right-wing pundits in 2017, of an old tweet by MSNBC correspondent Sam Seder, a furor that led to Seder being fired and then rehired. It can take the shape of broad fan-led cultural conversations like the backlash over the 2016 Ghostbusters reboot — before it had been released — because the reboot had an all-female cast. Or it can come from misassumptions born of vulnerability, like the harassment by the queer and trans sci-fi community of the anonymous trans writer Isabel Fall — and the subsequent harassment, over a year later, of people peripherally associated with her harassment, in a tale without apparent end. In all of these cases, the common thread is the presumption, all around, of ill intent.
Internet researcher Alice Marwick’s investigations into morally motivated networked harassment shed some light on why we’re so suspicious of one another and willing to behave so aggressively. Marwick found that when groups of people on social media believed their moral code had been violated, they felt so justified in their harassment of their targets that they refused to acknowledge it as harassment.
“When you think of somebody as being immoral, that shuts down the ability to have a conversation,” Marwick told me in a 2021 interview. “It really does encourage dehumanization and seeing other people as the other, rather than as actual people. There are places where our sense of morality is so strong that we don’t believe the other person can be redeemed.”
Imagine facing down this kind of collective movement. A person who starts out willing to listen and learn from their critics can become so badly burned by toxic harassment that they lash out at their critics and dig in their heels instead. That has a bunch of ripple effects. It makes the harassers feel even more validated in their actions and anger. It fuels the idea that the offender was never sincerely sorry to begin with, which can lead to more anger and retribution. It also can make the target even less likely to listen and learn the next time someone accuses them of doing something wrong because they’ve already been burned and they have less reason than ever to trust their accusers.
The idea of “bad-faith engagement” has become kind of a buzzy shorthand for the messiness of this process, but it really is the key to any conversation we have about forgiveness.
To reach a point where anger and toxicity are diminished, we have to engage with each other sincerely and respectfully, believing that the people on the receiving end of our anger have the best of intentions in engaging with us. We have to replace bad-faith engagement with good-faith engagement. That doesn’t mean, necessarily, that we must wind up dealing in good faith with extremists, conspiracists, disinformation agents, and other bad actors. It might mean that we stop assuming everyone who says anything with which we disagree falls into one of those categories.
We’re a long way from knowing how to do that.
It doesn’t help that a sincere apology — the thing society requires to move forward, presuming a threshold of good faith can be met at all — is often a disaster when it happens on a public stage. If it happens at all.
The classic apology,as described by social psychologists in 2004, involves “admitting fault, admitting damage, expressing remorse, asking for forgiveness, and offering compensation.” Yet while plenty of research has been done on the perfect apology, we’ve had very few cultural examples of one being delivered effectively and sincerely. We’ve had even fewer examples of such an apology being followed up with a process of actual atonement.
Louis C.K., who many were eager to forgive in the wake of Me Too revelations of his sexual misconduct in 2017, drew plenty of tentativepraise for his apology to his victims, and his promise to “step back and take a long time to listen.” When C.K. returned to standup, less than a year later, it was a far cry from what his apology had promised; instead of making amends, C.K. mocked and denigrated those who had tried to cancel him. “Fuck it, what are you going to take away, my birthday?” he replied to a shocked audience. “My life is over, I don’t give a shit.”
Even when we get close to something that looks like the “textbook” apology, it’s difficult to trust. After nearly ruining his career by filming a dead body in Japan’s Aokigahara forest in 2017, wildly popular YouTuber Logan Paul embarked on a long and well-mapped-out redemption tour, one that involved making repeated public apologies, including a notoriously poorly received one on YouTube.
At first, his core audience wasn’t buying it, but Paul’s strategy appeared to work. He filmed himself talking to suicide survivors and prevention organizations, rapidly absorbed and adopted the progressive language of the restorative justice movement, and spoke often about social issues on his podcast, Impaulsive. By 2020, his fans were praising him for things like his unequivocal, articulate support of Black Lives Matter. Business Insider observed that Paul “has been more or less forgiven for doing what many consider to be one of the worst things a major YouTuber has ever done on the platform,” and praised him for pulling off a remarkable “redemption story … largely of his own making.”
Some might think Paul has done just about all a person can do to apologize and make amends. Yet wariness persists. Paul’s apology video set off a chain reaction of YouTuber apology videos, each one less sincere than the last, to the point where the media began treating them (and similar videos from others) like their own terrible genre. In 2020, linguists published “A Discourse Analysis on Logan Paul’s Apologies: Are They Apologetic Enough?” The answer, they found, was not quite: While Paul’s apologies contained some of the ingredients of a successful apology, they were missing a few key factors: an offer of repairing the wrong done and compensating those harmed by his actions.
In other words, Paul’s apologies were effective but flawed, and his subsequent comeback is arguably as much a lesson in effective image repair as it is in atonement.
That’s not to say that no celebrity has ever managed an effective apology and won forgiveness from their intended recipient. In 2018, after making a lengthy and considered apology to a former junior colleague whom he had sexually harassed for months, Dan Harmon, creator of Community and Rick and Morty, received a public pardon from her. Their exchange madeheadlines at the time — though Vice has since noted that Harmon “has a history of being a proud asshole, but apologizing when he gets caught.”
Whether someone possesses the ability to make a thoughtful, heartfelt apology and then apply those learned lessons to avoid other similar mistakes may seem like an apology side quest. But it’s a further consideration for those who’ve been victimized: When experience teaches you that some people can and do hide bad behavior under a mask of contrition, it only increases your mistrust.
Still, we might be able to live with a celebrity doing superficial image repair, or a celebrity who seems to struggle to make lasting change,over a celebrity who’s convinced no offense has happened to begin with. Take a J.K. Rowling or a Dave Chappelle, whose offenses against trans people have yet to make a significant dent in their huge and loyal fan bases. In that kind of case, how does the forgiveness process begin for the rest of us, or should it begin at all?
It’s a basic existential question for which we have no answer. We really don’t know who forgiveness is for. Is it for the alienated, hurt victims of an act, or is it for everyone? Is its aim to heal the injured or to allow the general public to move on?
Consider Roman Polanski. Plenty of major Hollywood figures over the years have publicly called for Polanski to be forgiven for raping a 13-year-old girl in 1977. As an adult, his victim publicly forgave him herself. In the absence of any serious accountability for Polanski, however, many refuse to move on. “Forgiveness is not enough,” Julia Baird wrote for Newsweek in 2009, in a piece stressing the importance of holding Polanski accountable rather than treating his victim’s forgiveness as a form of absolution.
Or consider Mel Gibson, who has apologized and made reparations to Jewish people for his anti-Semitism, but not to queer communities for his homophobia. “I’ll apologize [to gay people] when hell freezes over,” he told Playboy in 1995. In recent years, he’s become adept at apologizing without actually apologizing.
Because there’s no way to collectively arbitrate accountability for unaccountable public figures, there’s no easily definable start and end point for forgiveness. Asking everyone who’s invested in the process to just give up and move on, or to collectively agree that someone has atoned, is all but impossible.
That brings us to what is arguably the most difficult aspect of the forgiveness conversation: letting go.
Perhaps the most important takeaway from Marwick’s research is that the social media dynamics that cause us to feel morally justified in harassing one another also reward holding onto our outrage. So much of the genuine fear of cancel culture involves this idea that once you’re “canceled,” nothing you can do, however well-intentioned, will be enough to satisfy the people baying for your blood. It’s easy to see why that fear exists.
Social media rewards pithy, angry takes rather than nuanced, balanced discussions, then boosts those takes so they attract more angry, non-nuanced takes. It can feel good to be part of that collective anger, especially when you feel righteous. It’s often extremely difficult to let that anger go, to forgive, adjust, and move on.
Most moral and spiritual authorities teach us that the cycle of repentance usually involves grace. Grace, the act of allowing people room to be human and make mistakes while still loving them and valuing them, might be the holiest, most precious concept of all in this conversation about right and wrong, penance and reform — but it’s the one that almost never gets discussed.
That’s understandable. Grace relies on some huge assumptions: that people mean well and that their intent is not to be hurtful; that they are capable of self-reflection and change; and, of course, that we all possess equal shares of dignity and humanity.
These are all pretty big asks in a world that has become increasingly divisive and hateful. It’s easy to say we shouldn’t assume that every anonymous internet stranger or every person on the other side of a debate is a bad actor, sure. Still, when you’re meeting people only in the limited context of a username, a profile pic, and a few angry statements on social media, it’s not easy to stop and remember there might be a whole, well-intentioned person behind the avatar.
That’s what makes the concept of grace so powerful. It forces us to contend not only with other people’s human frailty but with our own: to remember how good it feels when someone, out of the blue, treats us with respect, empathy, and kindness in the middle of an angry conversation where we expect nothing but hostility. To be shown the kindness of strangers when we expect cruelty, and then bestow that gift in turn — that’s the remarkable quality of grace. But there’s little room for it when we’re barely able to handle the concept of forgiveness, and equally unable to stop being angry with the offender after all is said and done.
And so, we arrive back at the beginning of the cycle: We hang on to our anger, and all of this anger puts the possibility of grace even further out of reach. Perhaps there’s a perverse commonality in knowing that no matter what “side” we’re on, we’re all bad at this. Being generous and gracious to each other is a difficult, grueling process for everyone. We all struggle at it, together.
Republicans made Ketanji Brown Jackson’s confirmation hearing about Brett Kavanaugh -
US Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson is sworn in during her confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, March 21, in Washington, DC. | Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
The hearing surfaced a slew of old grievances and political attacks.
Several Republicans, including Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Ted Cruz (R-TX), sought to draw a direct contrast between how Jackson is being treated and how Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh was treated during his hearing in 2018. Repeatedly, senators noted that Jackson’s questioning would focus on her legal record and not what they called the “personal attacks” Kavanaugh experienced, when he was faced with allegations of sexual assault. In doing so, they downplayed the allegations brought against him and tried to suggest that their treatment of Jackson this week would be an improvement upon how Democrats previously behaved.
“When we say this is not Kavanaugh, what do we mean?” Graham said. “It means Democratic senators are not going to have their windows busted by groups. No Republican senator is going to unleash an attack on your character when the hearing is almost over.”
It’s a way to preempt the possible blame Republicans might get for their questioning of Jackson, said Mike Davis, the head of the Article III Project, a right-leaning advocacy group focused on the federal judiciary.
“It preempts any complaints Democrats might have about GOP criticisms of Judge Jackson’s record because their attacks on Justice Kavanaugh were personal and unproven,” Davis, who has been informally advising Republican staff, told Vox. “It’s also a reminder to the public of how terribly Democrats treated Justice Kavanaugh and his family. The GOP will focus on her professional record, giving their criticisms more credibility.” (There are key differences between the two: for instance, Kavanaugh faced credible allegations of sexual assault, while Jackson does not.)
Republicans also emphasized Democrats’ past opposition to federal judicial nominees Miguel Estrada, who is Latino, and Janice Rogers Brown, who is Black, to suggest that Democrats have been harsher on nominees of color if they are GOP appointees.
Republicans’ questions and attacks this week are intended to make the hearing “more of a political wash instead of a political win for Democrats,” Davis previously explained. By drawing attention to the ways Democrats have allegedly mistreated Republican nominees, the GOP is trying to suggest that its treatment of Jackson is well within Senate norms.
“If there’s one thing you can say about the judicial nomination wars, they’ll always say they’re responding to the previous bad behavior of the other side,” said Ilya Somin, a law professor at George Mason University and adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute.
Republicans relitigated past nominations
Republicans spent much of the first day walking through a litany of grievances about past nomination fights.
Many referenced Kavanaugh in some way, and many also spoke about Estrada and Rogers.
“We will be fair and thorough, as people would expect us to be, but we won’t get down in the gutter like Democrats did during the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings,” Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) said in his remarks.
Kavanaugh was confirmed after a dramatic nomination fight that saw allegations surface against him of decades-old sexual misconduct, prompting an incredibly acrimonious fight among senators, large protests at the Capitol, and a dramatic and emotional second round of hearings and testimony at the height of the national Me Too movement.
The comparison suggests that Jackson and Kavanaugh’s nominations are taking place under similar contexts, though of course they are not. Republicans didn’t acknowledge that, and even played down the allegations.
“No one is going to inquire into your teenage dating habits,” Cruz said in remarks that appeared to gloss over the allegations Kavanaugh faced.
Statements by Republicans about both Estrada and Rogers Brown also seemed aimed at showing that Democrats have also previously opposed nominees of color. From 2001 to 2003, Democrats blocked Estrada’s nomination for the DC Circuit Court of Appeals due to questions about his experience and the belief that he’d add to the conservative tilt of the court. He was ultimately forced to withdraw his nomination. Rogers Brown, meanwhile, was confirmed for an appeals court seat in 2005, but only after Democrats delayed her nomination for two years because of her conservative views on issues including labor rights.
“The point Republicans might be trying to make is, if it was okay for Dems to oppose Janice Rogers Brown on judicial philosophy grounds, Republicans can oppose Ketanji Brown Jackson on judicial philosophy grounds,” Somin said.
In addition to citing their complaints with how past nominations were handled, Republicans also previewed other topics they intend to ask Jackson about this week, including her sentencing decisions in child porn cases, her work defending Guantanamo Bay detainees, and her position on packing the court.
Somin notes that Kavanaugh’s hearing was widely viewed as energizing Republican voters in 2018, just ahead of those midterm elections, and references to it now could at least temporarily fuel the base.
Republicans have also tied Jackson’s positions on sentencing to a broader “soft on crime” attack they’ve fielded against Democrats prior to the midterms. As crime rates have increased during the pandemic, the GOP has sought to pin the blame on President Joe Biden and other Democratic lawmakers.
This week’s hearings offer them another avenue to make that same case.
How the next pandemic surge will be different -
Health workers admit a patient to the Princess Margaret Hospital in Hong Kong on March 3. Hong Kong is facing its worst coronavirus outbreak. | Emmanuel Serna/LightRocket via Getty Images
The same: The brutal math of exponential growth. Different: Our pandemic fatigue is worse than ever.
Covid-19 cases are rising again in Europe. They’re outright exploding across much of Asia. The United States, however, is in a Covid lull, having just come down from the winter’s omicron outbreak.
It’s an uneasy time. On one hand, it’s likely the worst of the pandemic is over, at least in terms of severe illness and death. But on the other hand, we have to ask: Do these upticks in the rest of the world foreshadow America’s future?
It’s true that the US often sees cases rise several weeks after they tick upward in the United Kingdom. We are again watching a new(ish) variant, BA.2, trace a familiarly steep curve on graphs tracking new cases, provoking a familiar but chronically contentious question: What should we do about it, as individuals and as a society?
While this moment feels familiar in many ways, several factors set it apart from previous pandemic lulls.
Collectively, we have more immunity, and more treatments, than ever before. At the same time, we’re more fatigued about the state of the pandemic and arguably less prepared for a wave, considering there’s more confusion than ever about what our individual risk is at any place and time.
Taking a hard look at what’s new and what’s not about ourselves, the virus, and our policy landscape can help us convert some of that painful familiarity — and some of the scary unknowns — into preparedness. To do that, it’s helpful to take stock of how a next wave will likely behave like past waves, and how it might be different. So let’s start with what won’t change.
The same: The brutal math of exponential growth
Although the omicron subvariant BA.2 was first identified in November 2021, it has only become a dominant variant over the past several weeks in parts of Asia and Europe. Early laboratory work has suggested this variant is about 30 percent more contagious than the already highly transmissible BA.1 omicron variant, which was the dominant strain during the last US surge.
Regardless of the exact variant, the shape of each wave is determined by the same brutal math. Small upticks in cases quickly explode due to exponential growth, and case counts grow exponentially until they don’t. We’re already starting to see that growth start as transmission rises in the United Kingdom, Germany, and other European countries.
Our World in Data
Cases are starting to rise again in Europe.
At home and abroad, we can generally expect to see hospitalizations rise one to two weeks after cases rise, and deaths to rise another four to six weeks after that, depending on the public health system’s capacity. Hong Kong and South Korea are in this phase, reporting increasing and record-high death rates.
Our World in Data
Though both countries are experiencing a surge, death rates are much higher in Hong Kong than in South Korea.
The same: The tools we used to fight past waves still work
No matter how transmissible a variant is, the same precautionary measures — like vaccination, quarantine and isolation, masking, and testing — work to prevent its spread.
If those measures are in effect, transmission slows. If they are dropped, it speeds up. In this light, the current waves in Europe and Asia may have as much to do with policy decisions as they do with the transmissibility of the BA.2 variant.
In Asia, too, the causes of rising deaths seem to go beyond the virus’s intrinsic properties. The BA.2 subvariant doesn’t appear to causemore severe disease than earlier omicron variants, nor to be any more evasive of vaccines than other variants. While it can still cause severe illness and death, especially in elderly people, vaccines seem to remain highly effective even in this high-risk population.
In Hong Kong, the sudden spike in deaths is likely due to the lack of vaccine coverage among elderly people. There, thepandemic is raging largely among unvaccinated seniors without much previous exposure to Covid-19; few vaccinated people are being hospitalized.
Notably, even though deaths are higher than ever in both countries, the death rate is actually much lower in South Korea, likely due to its much higher rate of vaccinations among elderly residents in particular.
Anthony Kwan/Getty Images
Pedestrians cross an intersection at a busy shopping district in Hong Kong on March 21. Hong Kong is experiencing a sudden spike in Covid-19 death rates.
America has the tools to fight a new wave — it’s just a question of how and whether it uses them, said Dr. Joshua Sharfstein, a professor at Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health. “The fundamental question,” Sharfstein said, is “can we be nimble and flexible to the facts of the pandemic?” Will people and policymakers be willing to bring back restrictions like mask mandates now that they’ve been dialed down?
Masks, especially respirators (these are the high-quality N95s or KN95s), still work to protect individuals if they’re exposed to people infected with Covid-19. N95 respirators offer excellent protection from viral exposure, even if you’re the only one wearing one in a group of people. And manufacturers are getting better at making them more comfortable to wear for hours on end.
Rapid home Covid-19 tests still work to provide in-the-moment actionable information. During the first omicron wave, some people got in the habit of testing before any group social activity, and after exposures. When a wave is rising, that practice should resume. It should be helpful that rapid tests are now far more widely available than they were during the previous wave.
We also know more about ventilation and air filtration than we have at earlier points in the pandemic. The Environmental Protection Agency just released new guidance on ventilation, and as the weather warms, opening windows and using fans to choreograph good air flow can do a lot to reduce risk during gatherings. When fresh air isn’t an option, air cleaners (think HEPA filters) help — and while many good ones are commercially available, DIY options also work well and are relatively easy to construct.
Whichever protective measures work best in your world, it’s a good idea to gather several week’s worth of supplies before cases rise.
Different: US levels of population immunity are higher now than ever before, and there are more therapies to avoid severe disease
One of the key differences between this moment and previous pandemic lulls is the level of community immunity. The US has high rates of vaccination — 65 percent of all Americans have received at least two vaccines, and 50 percent of those eligible have been boosted. There’s also more infection-acquired immunity; a high proportion of even those who are unvaccinated have some infection- related protection.
All told, nearly three-quarters of the US population has some level of immunity, according to researchers at the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. More immunity means people are less likely to be hospitalized with Covid-19, even if case counts surge.
For those who do get sick, a range of therapies is now more broadly available than at any other point during the pandemic. Monoclonal antibodies, which identify and attack viral particles before they can cause severe disease, now come in long-lasting formulations to protect immunocompromised people; the antibodies act like an additional, durable layer of immunity on top of vaccinations, which can help prevent infections in this vulnerable group.Several shorter-acting forms of this therapy can also be used to treat high-risk or severely ill people if infection has already happened. Additionally, antiviral medications are now available in both oral and intravenous forms.
The biggest challenge to getting these therapies right now is politics: Congress recently axed $15 billion in Covid-19 funding that would have covered the costs of antibody treatments and maintained access to Paxlovid, an antiviral medication. The abrupt vacuum of resources severely muddled the path forward on identifying and accessing Covid-19 treatment for everyone, but especially for people without insurance. Whether and how this problem will be solved is unclear, although without continued funding, people needing treatment will feel the effects of the cuts beginning in April.
“Not all of the policymakers have learned their lesson,” said Dial Hewlett, an infectious disease physician who is deputy commissioner of the Westchester County health department in White Plains, New York. Without investments in research, public health infrastructure, and regulatory agency staff, he said, “We may be doomed to repeat history.”
Different: Assessing personal risk is deeply confusing
In early April 2020, federal guidance recommended masks in public places, and masks have been required in federal buildings since January 2021. The CDC issued recommendations for schools in September 2020 recommending masking and other strategies for students and teachers.
All of those recommendations have now expired, replaced by a system for assessing county Covid-19 levels based on case counts and hospitalizations. (A federal requirement to wear masks when using most public modes of travel will stay in place until at least April 18.)
The CDC’s new website offers guidance to state and local health departments and school districts, with the specific guidance varying based on local transmission rates and hospitalizations. It’s these more local authorities who ultimately make the rules for their jurisdictions.
However, because these authorities follow the CDC’s guidance to widely varying degrees, neighboring counties may take very different approaches to public preventive measures like indoor masking requirements or capacity limits.For the near term, many US residents will continue to live amid a patchwork of precaution that might be different in the county where you live than in the one where you work or send your kids to school.
Marvin Joseph/Washington Post via Getty Images
Students stage a walkout in protest of the DC Public Schools response to Covid-19 safety on January 25.
If you live in a jurisdiction that’s proactive about instituting preventive policies, congrats, your next steps may be clear. However, many are not in that position, and may feel baffled about the best way to determine when to mask up or take other safety measures.
What’s a well-intentioned person to do amid all this confusion — especially given the concern that so many other people are not going to do that much?
The CDC’s county check website, while imperfect, may be a good place to start: It allows people to view safety recommendations specific to their county’s Covid-19 levels (i.e., a metric based on cases and hospitalizations), and suggests additional layers of protection high- risk people should add. But it has a big limitation: “It doesn’t help you understand your own personal vulnerability,” said Jay Varma, a physician and epidemiologist based in New York City.
For individual users of the website, there’s no easy way to determine what “high risk” means and whether your age, medical conditions, or lifestyle places you in that category. “It’s not the best tool for individuals to use as an instrument to guide them — it’s not as good as a weather report,” said Varma.
While determining your local risk level day to day may not be straightforward, ensuring your Covid-19 vaccinations are up to date — including a fourth shot, if that’s what’s recommended for you — is the simplest way for most people to minimize their individual risk. Additionally, wearing a high-quality mask like a KN95 or N95 when you judge yourself or your situation to be high-risk protects you regardless of what other people are doing (or not).
Different: Pandemic fatigue is real
Two years into the pandemic, our collective level of exhaustion is manifesting in some worrisome ways. Deaths are creeping toward a million, but collective action isn’t keeping pace. Anger and denial have led to irrational decision-making and behavior by leaders and individuals.
Panagis Galiatsatos, a physician and professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine who has engaged Baltimore-area faith leaders and congregations in Covid-19 education since the pandemic’s early days, said he is concerned about the level of pandemic fatigue he’s heard during recent meetings. After the holiday omicron wave forced many worship services online, “what they fear is going back to not being in person again,” he said.
If public health leaders forbid in-person gatherings due to another wave of transmission, he fears it will lead many members of the public to lose faith in public health leaders altogether. “I think we’re going to lose our audience,” he said. “So I think what’s different now is definitely the fatigue is there.”
<img alt="Protestors hold signs like “Mask choice” and “Mask freedom” in a protest." src="https://cdn.vox-
cdn.com/thumbor/4ehUQoSSfSTozIK9E29y1cjj80w=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox- cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23333607/GettyImages_1237813211_copy.jpg" /> Mindy Schauer/MediaNewsGroup/Orange County Register via Getty Images
Protesters against mask mandates gather outside the Placentia-Yorba Linda Unified School District office in Southern California on January 18.
One of the biggest risks of low social morale is that it could delay buy-in to critical Covid-19 prevention measures even if the virus is causing a great deal of community suffering. People may take longer to agree to mask up, or may be more reluctant to show vaccination cards. And when precautions are eventually implemented, will it be too late? Is there hope of doing something about denial and fatigue before they become the death of us?
With our trust in institutions at a low point, one-on-one conversations between individuals may be one of the most important ways forward. “If it’s not going to be public messaging, let’s do private messaging,” said Galiatsatos. That involves a lot of listening and compassion by scientists and public health authorities, but it also involves making recommendations that meet people where they are.
“People aren’t switches to turn off and on,” he said. “We’re not going to be ignorant of the next wave, but we’re definitely going to discuss it in a way, like, ‘How do you make it adaptable?’”
Perhaps the biggest difference we can hope for is a broader understanding of the pandemic itself, not as a thing we can turn off or on, but as a dimmer switch that our collective action moves — and keeps — up or down.
From The Hindu: Sports
Raffaello shines -
ICC Women’s ODI World Cup | India’s semifinal hopes alive with 110-run win against Bangladesh - Yastika’s fifty helped India to 229 before Sneh Rana took four wickets to bundle out Bangladesh for 119
National archery championships in Jammu from Tuesday - The championships will begin with the recurve events and it will be interesting to see how the Asia Cup-returned archers fare
Greater challenge for Lakshya begins now: Padukone - He has all the qualities required to remain a medal contender for the next few years, says the legend
It’s time to build on the momentum, says Shabbir - HFC win is a perfect reminder that we have to look far ahead: Amalraj
From The Hindu: National News
41 of 72 arrested fishermen released - The rest likely to be freed soon: Anitha R. Radhakrishnan
NEP lays thrust on accessibility, quality education: NAAC Director - It supports creative thinking, reviving knowledge traditions, says S.C. Sharma at the 102nd annual convocation of UoM
India must stand against autocracies like Russia and China: senior U.S. official - Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland ends visit, calls on Jaishankar
Better to err on the side of caution to ensure public health during pandemic, Tamil Nadu tells Supreme Court - State says the vaccine mandate, issued through a circular in November last, is backed by law
DMK, AIADMK spar over poll assurances - Each accuses the other of failure to keep the promises
From BBC: Europe
Ukraine war: Belarusian dissidents fight against Russia in Ukraine - Belarusian dissident Pavel Kulazhanka left his life in New York to join the fight against Russia.
Russia Navalny: Putin critic jailed for nine more years trial branded ‘sham’ - Alexei Navalny is to be sent to a maximum security jail after a judge gave him nine more years in jail.
Malmö: Two women killed after violent attack at Swedish school - An 18-year-old student is arrested on suspicion of murder after two deaths in the city of Malmö.
Yvan Colonna: Corsican nationalist dies after jihadist jail attack - Yvan Colonna’s strangling by a fellow inmate had sparked violent protests on the French island.
Chelsea: Centricus bid to buy club intends to ‘maintain existing management’ - British investment firm Centricus says it wants to “maintain and support existing management” in bid to buy Chelsea.
From Ars Technica
Take a peek inside a flickering candle flame with these 3D-printed shapes - MIT’s Markus Buehler also built system to turn language into 3D-printed materials. - link
“Evolution can occur really, really rapidly” - Researchers detect genetic changes in response to seasonal change. - link
White House warns of possible Russian cyberstrike on US critical infrastructure - There’s no evidence now of specific attacks planned, but evolving intel is concerning. - link
SEC will require companies to list greenhouse emissions, climate risks - A proposed rule tries to give investors a fuller picture of risk. - link
Starlink helps Ukraine’s elite drone unit target and destroy Russian tanks - “If we use a drone with thermal vision at night, [it] must connect through Starlink.” - link
From Jokes Subreddit
A woman is flirting with a Russian man at a bar(a joke) -
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