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Unsanitized: The COVID-19 Report for Nov. 30, 2020

The Vaccine Distribution Gaps

There's a gap in transparency and a gap in funding. Plus, looking at
the holiday travel stats

 

Pfizer's U.S. headquarters in Manhattan. (zz/STRF/STAR MAX/IPx)

First Response

Welcome back from the break. The coronavirus continues to rage out of
control. Cases and deaths dropped over the weekend, but it was largely
due to holiday reporting. That will come back with a vengeance this week
and lead to some of the biggest numbers of the pandemic. And we're not
even at the point of factoring in the impact of millions of small
gatherings for Thanksgiving around the country. We should all brace
ourselves for a terrible December.

But let's also focus on the positive developments. Moderna formally
filed its application

for an emergency use authorization in the U.S. and Europe today for its
COVID vaccine. The statistics Moderna has been willing to give out are
impressive: 94 percent effectiveness, nobody who received the vaccine
getting severely ill, and no long-run safety effects.

Of course, "the statistics Moderna has been willing to give out" is
key here, because we have not seen a full dataset from any of the early
vaccine candidates. Science by corporate press release has come back to
bite AstraZeneca pretty hard. The company will likely run another global
trial
,
after their initial announcement of results showed a higher
effectiveness rate for those who got half-strength for one of the two
doses than for those who got two full shots. This turned out to be done
erroneously (it was a manufacturing error to provide a half-shot), and
it wasn't initially disclosed. Also the age range of those who got
full doses played a role.

Weirdly, AstraZeneca doesn't expect this to hold up authorization for
its vaccine in the UK and the EU. U.S. authorization will probably be
delayed, because the FDA prefers to authorize with domestic data.

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But it should bring up a larger point. We are already pre-positioning
shots

around the country, adding special freezers

to grocery store pharmacies, and preparing for immediate deployment of
the vaccine. The anticipation is useful and correct. But it's all
based on a set of information that has been delivered through marketing
documents meant to put the pharmaceutical firm in the best light. The
FDA will see much more than that, of course. However, the need for a
vaccine bordering on desperation, and the supplies positioned already,
and the narrative in the public mind created that these are safe and
effective vaccines has to all be weighing on the decision-makers.

These studies could be sent to medical journals for peer review. Even if
that's too much, there could be more transparency than a press release
with promising numbers plastered on it. These companies are poised to
make a lot of money, too much in fact (the World Trade Organization is
correctly considering whether to waive patent protections for
COVID-related medications, like vaccines). Expecting a modicum of
transparency isn't much to ask.

We Can't Do This Without You

Meanwhile, the question of how states and cities are going to pull off
distribution

lingers. The Trump administration, to the extent there still is one
that's not trying to push through deregulation and hock the furniture
on Craigslist, has completely disclaimed responsibility
,
pushing questions like eligibility for the initial vaccine allotment to
the states. Autonomy is good, but the key point here is lack of funding.
Chuck Schumer says it'll take $30 billion

to get the vaccine distributed.

It's crazy that this is not the immediate topic in Congress right now,
and it's actually very depressing. You'd have thought gridlock
wouldn't last amid the survival of hundreds of thousands of citizens,
but you'd be wrong. The price tag of $30 billion is a rounding error
for the federal government. This should be like a disaster relief
supplemental. Even if there are ideological differences on economic
relief (there shouldn't be), money to get a life-saving drug into the
arms of people shouldn't have any opposition. And yet Congress has
little more than a week left in the lame duck session, and there's no
expectation of getting this funded. It's as shocking an abdication of
responsibility as we've seen in this crisis.

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Doing the Math on Holiday Distancing

We've gotten through the holiday weekend, and it provided a natural
experiment for how much of the country takes into account public health
directives. The CDC was late on it, but it did encourage a lack of
travel amid the raging pandemic. So who put their plans aside as a
result?

Well, TSA tracks the number of people
who go through
their checkpoints daily. We have numbers through Sunday, spanning the
busiest travel days of Thanksgiving: the Wednesday before, and the
Saturday and Sunday after. These numbers were more elevated than at any
time

during the pandemic, but honestly not that much more elevated. On the
Wednesday before Thanksgiving 2019, 2.62 million people took to the
skies; this past Wednesday it was 1.07 million. On Saturday 2019, 2.64
million; last Saturday, 964,000. Sunday 2019, 2.88 million; yesterday,
1.17 million. That all tracks at about 39.4 percent of 2019 Thanksgiving
traffic this year, and that was generally the ratio throughout the past
holiday week.

Meanwhile, Black Friday in-person shopping was also significantly lower
.
Here the ask was just to buy things online instead of in a store,
crammed in with other shoppers. It was a much lower-level ask. Online
commerce set records
,
up 22 percent. In-store traffic fell 52 percent
.

Put this all together and you get this fact: between 40 and 48 percent
of the public disregards public health messages when they impinge on
their daily lives and annual rituals. Frankly it's a smaller number
than I expected! But it's hard to escape the fact that public health
has been politicized, and these numbers are consistent with that result.

Days Without a Bailout Oversight Chair

248
.

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Today I Learned

* Thanks to Salon for this profile

of our Day One Agenda work.
(Salon)

* Hospitals at the breaking point
.
(New York Times)

* The failure on COVID response is here. The failure on the economy was
only delayed
.
(The Atlantic)

* The eviction moratorium wasn't entirely effective, but when it
lifts, potentially 19 million Americans

could be dispossessed. (CBS News)

* Will Congress wipe out the debt

from the practically unused payroll tax deferral? (Wall Street Journal)

* Insurers are winning

most business interruption insurance lawsuits. (Bloomberg)

* Elementary schools reopening in New York City
,
as parents win a round. We'll see if it was wise. (New York Times)

* The tragedy of resort towns, especially ones already laden with high
poverty like Atlantic City
.
(Politico)

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