Category: Public safety & health
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New COVID Data Displays
The Virginia Department of Health is now publishing a graph that compares the COVID-19 infection rate by vaccination status. The graph above, based on 2021 data, shows that unvaccinated people have confirmed COVID-19 infections at a rate 4.6 times that of fully vaccinated people and 2.2 times that of partially vaccinated people.
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Omigod, Omicron Is Coming!
by Kerry Dougherty I’ve seen this movie before. And I’m not buying a ticket this time. I’m talking about the latest remake in the theater of the absurd: “A New COVID Variant Is Coming! We’re All Going To Die!” Fear hustlers managed to spook the stock markets on Friday with panic porn about a variant…
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Was UVa’s Vax Mandate Justified? We’ll Never Know.
by James A. Bacon This academic year the University of Virginia mandated that all students get vaccinated. With few exceptions, all have done so, as have most of the university’s 30,000 faculty, staff and employees. According to the Daily Progress, only 173 are estimated to be out of compliance. They have until January 4 to…
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How Data Asymmetry Drives COVID Policy
by James A. Bacon There’s a common saying in the business world: You manage what you measure. In Virginia, as in the rest of the United States, we have a super-abundance of data about COVID-19. Just visit the VDH website for a taste. As we have frequently observed on this blog — and we’re hardly…
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Bedlam at Southwest Airlines
by Kerry Dougherty At the risk of sounding like a paid Southwest Airlines P.R. person, I can truthfully say it’s my favorite airline. No change fees. Two bags fly free. Decent fares if you book early enough. Best of all, Southwest flies out of our sad little airport. Those perks are nice, but what impressed…
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What If They Threw A Party And No One Got COVID?
by James A. Bacon It has been a month since Hokie fans packed the stands of the Virginia Tech-University of North Carolina football game in Tech’s Lane Stadium, sparking social-media fears of a massive spread. Despite the spectacle of thousands of screaming, expectorating fans in close quarters, there has been no meaningful outbreak. Not only…
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Delta Variant On the Downhill Slide in Virginia
by James A. Bacon It appears that Virginia has turned the corner on the Delta variant. According to the weekly update from the University of Virginia Biocomplexity Institute Friday, the Institute’s COVID-19 model indicates that “cases have peaked and are in gradual decline.” I don’t know about you, but that strikes me as good news…
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Virginia’s Self-Inflicted Nursing Home Crisis — Part 2, the Business
by James C. Sherlock Nursing homes are businesses. Seventy percent of those in Virginia are for profit. They are run not by doctors but registered nurses with physicians on call. Nursing facilities very widely in size in Virginia, from the 300-bed Mulberry Creek Nursing and Rehab center in Martinsville to facilities of less than 30…
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Virginia’s Self-Inflicted Nursing Home Crisis – Part 1
by James C. Sherlock None of us ever knows when we will need a nursing home for ourselves, our parents or our kids. Yes, kids. While long-term nursing care is mostly for older patients, skilled nursing facilities are needed for patients of all ages, including children, for shorter term post-op treatment and recovery. The patients…
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Northam’s Scare Tactics
by Kerry Dougherty It was a gird-your-loins kind of day in Virginia on Monday. While we were on the radio in the morning, our producer handed me a bulletin announcing that Governor Ralph Northam was holding a press conference in the afternoon, on the subject of COVID. Uh-oh. I can’t repeat what I said off…
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UVa Petri Dish Update
by James A. Bacon About a month ago I suggested that the University of Virginia would make an interesting real-world experiment in the effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccination mandates during the Delta Variant phase of the epidemic. The Ryan administration required vaccinations for all students, allowing only a handful of medical and religious exceptions. Vaccinations were…
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Pandemic and Pounds. Buy Bigger Belts
by Kerry Dougherty I’m shocked. Who could have predicted that closing fitness centers, filling public parks with sand, draining public pools, curtailing youth sports, shuttering schools and telling workers to stay home would result in a sharp increase in obesity? And who would have guessed that being obese would contribute to more serious outcomes for…
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VDH Still Can’t Count
by Carol J. Bova In a blog post published yesterday, I noted that the Virginia Department of Health (VDH) COVID-19 dashboard breaks down vaccination status by racial/ethnic group and by age, but not by racial/ethnic groups and age. Thinking that VDH might possess the data, even if it had chosen not to publish it, I…
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Follow the Science. Yeah, Right
by Kerry Dougherty Ever since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic I’ve been wondering what it would take for Americans to finally say they’d had enough. Enough of absurd and ineffective regulations imposed on them by leaders hiding behind claims that they were simply “following the science.” I was furious early in the spring of…
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Another Sick Idea: Vaccine Passports for Domestic Travel
by Kerry Dougherty Oh look. Rep. Don Beyer, a Virginia car dealer who served eight years as Virginia’s lieutenant governor and ran unsuccessfully for governor in 1997 against Jim Gilmore, is in the news. The congressman who represents the second-most Democratic district in the commonwealth — the 8th — has joined the Biden administration in…