Newsletter: COVID still rages, and the Biden administration isn’t helping

Good morning. I’m Paul Thornton, and it is Saturday, Jan.6, 2024. Let’s look back at the week in Opinion.

Readers who bristled at my assertion roughly a year ago — when the term “post-pandemic” was used a lot more cautiously than it is now — that we should still be masking really won’t like this: We should still be wearing masks indoors, because the COVID-19 pandemic still rages. And, as a physician writing on The Times’ op-ed page makes clear, the Biden administration isn’t helping.

The numbers of new infections and hospital admissions are sobering: Wastewater data indicate that the JN.1 variant of COVID-19 is infecting about 2 million Americans every day, making this surge second in prevalence only to the Omicron wave that hit in 2021 and 2022. Thanks to vaccines, the Omicron peak was less deadly than the wave that hit in late 2020 and early 2021, when mask mandates and social distancing were still our primary weapons against COVID-19 and inoculation was only beginning.

Even though the Omicron wave for most people marks the beginning of the “living with this disease” phase of COVID — where we forgo mitigation and accept the risks of infection by a survivable virus — large groups of people fared worse than ever. You know who did really poorly? Cancer patients, who died at a higher rate than during any previous surge. With compromised immune systems, they benefit more from mitigation measures such as masking than vaccination, but by the time Omicron rolled around many of us had grown tired of covering our faces and keeping our distance.

For most people, the price of an Omicron infection was mild illness and possibly long COVID; for cancer patients, it was a higher likelihood of dying.

As for long COVID — when crippling symptoms persist for months or even years after infection — it’s hard to quantify the price to society from millions of people walking around with brain fog and fatigue for interminable periods, not to mention the increased risk of heart disease and stroke long after infection. Deciding to live with COVID doesn’t mean any of this goes away, if by “living with COVID” you mean refusing to wear a high-quality mask.

Writing on our op-ed page, Dr. Eric J. Topol — whose work communicating the risks of unfettered virus circulation I consider indispensable — reminds us of the damage this JN.1 surge does to people without fully functioning immune systems, and the need of the government to continue developing vaccines that deliver better protection from COVID variants. He ends his piece, appropriately, by criticizing the Biden administration’s complacency:

“It’s crickets from the White House on COVID now, with no messaging on getting the updated booster or masking. The Biden administration has done far too little to accelerate research on effective treatments for long COVID.

“This passivity reinforces the illusion that the pandemic is behind us when it’s actually raging. And this season will be followed by a more quiescent period, which will, once again, lull us into thinking the pandemic is over. But there is no getting over it until we recognize reality and double down on the research that will allow us to block infections and virus spread, and achieve lasting, variant-proof immunity.”

This surprise argument could derail Trump’s effort to delay the Jan. 6 trial. A brief filed ahead of arguments on the former president’s immunity claim makes an argument based on a unanimous Supreme Court decision from the 1980s written by the late Justice Antonin Scalia. That decision said a defendant in most cases has no right to have an appeal heard before his criminal trial. Harry Litman writes, “If the argument succeeds, it will be an appellate version of the sort of Perry Mason moment that rarely happens in a real courtroom.”

Do young voters really want to teach Democrats a lesson by letting Trump back into the White House? Voters 24 and younger were solidly in President Biden’s corner in 2020 by the widest margin among all age groups. Now, some polls show the former president earning more support among young voters and other traditionally Democratic groups than the incumbent. “Perhaps this is a reflection on the impatience of youth, or, worse, a fundamentally weak grasp on how government operates,” writes Robin Abcarian.

This could be the year America fends off dictatorship, or invites it in. I’m not convinced Trump’s nomination is assured (a criminal conviction can change voters’ minds really quickly), but the fact that his popularity endures among Republican voters sets off alarm bells for our democracy. Historian Benjamin Carter Hett believes that even if Trump wins, America isn’t doomed to go the way of Germany in the 1930s or Italy in the 1920s, but there will still be serious consequences: “Freedom from a Trump dictatorship will not come without a struggle, and not without suffering, especially for the most vulnerable: the working poor, people of color, migrants and refugees, women who need abortions.”

Is 2024 the year you’ll become an American expat? With more Americans than ever thinking of living abroad for political reasons, Virginia Heffernan explores the logistics of fleeing to, say, Canada if those liberal Americans threatening emigration make good on their promise. Pandemic-era remote working may make our jobs portable, she finds, but old-fashioned bureaucracy may make us — you know, the actual humans with the jobs — much less so.

Israel’s Gaza strategy is to create facts on the ground that can’t be undone. Tariq Kenney-Shawa says Israel is setting the scene for ethnic cleansing: “By driving 2 million people from their homes, destroying critical infrastructure and bulldozing huge swaths of land entirely, the new facts on the ground Israel is creating will render Gaza uninhabitable by the time the guns fall silent, leaving no other option but mass displacement.”

More from this week in Opinion

From our columnists

• Jean Guerrero: How to have a meaningful conversation with your MAGA dad
• Jonah Goldberg: Nikki Haley’s slavery gaffe is a rare misstep from a good politician
• LZ Granderson: What Nikki Haley and Ricky Gervais have in common

From the op-ed desk

• A film projectionist once more, now in L.A. — resurrecting a dying craft
• Nikki Haley is the best hope to keep Trump out of the White House
• In a year of darkness, strangers helping a family in need brought light

From the editorial board

• L.A. needs to dump its hiring process that leaves critical city jobs unfilled
• Hydrogen isn’t clean if it adds to climate pollution. Biden’s rules are a good start
• Early decision admissions for college unfairly favor wealthy students

Letters to the editor

• Does anyone want the bullet train?
• Newsom ignores the Constitution by keeping Trump on the ballot
• Will Newsom go down as the governor who killed solar in California?