Virus and criple

We need our tourist dollars back. That was the vision of William Wrigley Jr. Cruise ships deposit as many as 2, people a week for brief stopovers while the Catalina Express ferries thousands more each day from mainland ports, including many who stay at hotels. Now the Express is just down to a couple runs a day, mainly carrying islanders to the mainland for doctor appointments or other essential trips while bringing a few utility workers over to keep things running.

And not just because they want to start making money again. Cafe Metropole is one of a handful of island restaurants still open for takeout and recently Wright has kept busy providing three meals a day to a group of Southern California Edison workers on the island temporarily. For safety sake, each set of meals is left just outside the lobby of a nearby hotel where the workers are staying, then carried inside by a security guard.

Instead his presidency visited upon the nation the carnage of about , coronavirus deaths, the worst year for jobs since the second world war and the biggest stress test for American democracy since the civil war.

He has left a very wide swath of American carnage and that is the last way I would want to be remembered by history, but that is how he will be remembered. Trump campaigned for president as a change agent but millions came to regard him as an agent of chaos. His line-crossing, envelope-pushing, wrecking-ball reign at the White House crashed in a fireball of lies about his election defeat and deadly insurrection at the US Capitol. Future generations of schoolchildren will read about him in textbooks as a twice-impeached one-term president.

The first person elected to the White House with no previous political or military experience, he represented a shock to the system and rebuke to the establishment.

It was the outbreak of a disinformation pandemic. Trump, by all accounts, tried to govern by gut instinct, refusing to read national security briefs but hanging on the words of hosts on the Fox News network. Instead he tries to divide us.

He was impeached by the House of Representatives for pressuring Ukraine for political favours but was comfortably acquitted by the Senate. Trump gratified Republicans by naming three supreme court justices and more than federal judges, giving the judiciary an enduring conservative bent, and enacting the biggest tax cuts and reforms for a generation.

He invested in the military and brought troops home, negotiated a new trade deal with Canada and Mexico and helped broker agreements between close ally Israel and three Arab states. It changed regulations, it rebuilt the American military, it recentred American foreign policy on American interests, it renegotiated trade policy around American jobs, it began to fundamentally shift the judiciary system back to a constitutional basis. And at the same time it was generating economic growth so you had the lowest Black and Latino unemployment in American history.

But the coronavirus did change everything. Could that be a good thing? Maybe if it results in milder illness than we see with the Delta variant. But nonetheless, you still are going to get infected if you are not vaccinated.

Read More. We are already almost two years into it in the US. Early on in the pandemic, I anticipated this would go at least 18 months.

That was because the only real perspective I had to understand what this coronavirus might look like was previous influenza pandemics. And I think that many of us assumed that at some point it would become a seasonal infection like influenza after two years or so. And this time they might foretell a tragic season. I got a rude awaking earlier this year in March and April when I saw the new Alpha variant emerge as well as the Beta and Gamma variants, and I had a sense that this was going to change how the pandemic would unfold.

As a result, I thought that some of the darkest days of the pandemic would be ahead of us and that was at a time in the spring when case numbers were dropping markedly in the United States and vaccine was flowing.

But I realized that variants were like mile-an-hour curveballs, and we couldn't predict if they might have increased transmissibility or the ability to cause severe illness. This conclusion was not popular among many of my colleagues and policy makers.

So, when Delta emerged in December , it wasn't really a surprise. There are still many unanswered questions. Why, for example, did we see Delta emerging in India rather than in other countries, which had a major surge of Covid cases in late spring, early summer ?

India has already had a big surge of Delta. And you can't attribute the lack of current cases to seasonality. Here we are in the middle of South Africa's summer seeing the emergence of the recently identified Omicron variant. One region is in the Northern Hemisphere around 30 degrees latitude and the other is around 30 degrees latitude in the Southern Hemisphere.

So there just hasn't been a predictability about why or where Covid will take root. What the Omicron variant means for the holidays. If I could understand why surges occur or why they go away or why they don't happen, then I'd be in a better place to answer questions about where Covid is headed. All I can tell you is when a surge starts, the level of vaccination has a tremendous impact on how much pain and suffering occur with that surge.

In the States, we've seen an extended surge in Minnesota since early September and Michigan just hit a record number of Covid hospitalizations.

Our experience in Minnesota and Michigan is similar to what is being seen in the United Kingdom, where their Delta surge has been ongoing since July. I don't know. I'd just say with great humility, I know less about this virus today than I probably did a year ago. The new variant was all around the world in the month of November. It clearly is highly infectious. A "travel ban" is something that nations might do initially just to lock things down while they understand what's going on -- it is not meant to be a long-term solution.

It's like police at a crime scene.