Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
Longer Looks: Interesting Reads You Might Have Missed
The New York Times: The Mask Slackers of 1918
The masks were called muzzles, germ shields and dirt traps. They gave people a “pig-like snout.” Some people snipped holes in their masks to smoke cigars. Others fastened them to dogs in mockery. Bandits used them to rob banks. More than a century ago, as the 1918 influenza pandemic raged in the United States, masks of gauze and cheesecloth became the facial front lines in the battle against the virus. But as they have now, the masks also stoked political division. Then, as now, medical authorities urged the wearing of masks to help slow the spread of disease. And then, as now, some people resisted. (Hauser, 8/3)
The New York Times: Wear Your Mask. Please. No, Not On Your Chin.
Rachel Kobylas longs for the days when her job as a code enforcement officer in the laid-back Florida town of Key West meant that she drove around making sure people turned off noisy power tools after 7 p.m. She went after overgrown grass, unpermitted construction and boats illegally parked on the street. That all changed this summer, when her main challenge became convincing the tourists, bartenders, T-shirt shop sales clerks and fishermen who flock along Key West’s sweltering streets in shorts and flip-flops that they should also be wearing a mask.And not just on their chin. (Robles, 7/31)
The Atlantic: The Pandemic's Biggest Mystery Is Our Own Immune System
There’s a joke about immunology, which Jessica Metcalf of Princeton recently told me. An immunologist and a cardiologist are kidnapped. The kidnappers threaten to shoot one of them, but promise to spare whoever has made the greater contribution to humanity. The cardiologist says, “Well, I’ve identified drugs that have saved the lives of millions of people.” Impressed, the kidnappers turn to the immunologist. “What have you done?” they ask. The immunologist says, “The thing is, the immune system is very complicated …” And the cardiologist says, “Just shoot me now.” (Yong, 8/5)
The New York Times: How To Think Like An Epidemiologist
There is a statistician’s rejoinder — sometimes offered as wry criticism, sometimes as honest advice — that could hardly be a better motto for our times: “Update your priors!” In stats lingo, “priors” are your prior knowledge and beliefs, inevitably fuzzy and uncertain, before seeing evidence. Evidence prompts an updating; and then more evidence prompts further updating, so forth and so on. This iterative process hones greater certainty and generates a coherent accumulation of knowledge. (Roberts, 8/4)
The New York Times: Native Americans Fight Coronavirus And Deficient Data
As the coronavirus outbreak in Washington State’s Yakima County worsened last month, Tashina Nunez recognized more and more of the patients who arrived in her hospital. They had coughs, fevers and, in some severe cases, respiratory failure. And many of them were her acquaintances and neighbors, members of the tribes that make up the Yakama Nation. Ms. Nunez, a nurse at a hospital in Yakima County and a Yakama Nation descendant, noticed that Native Americans, who make up about 7 percent of the county’s population, seemed to account for many of the hospital’s virus patients. Because the hospital does not routinely record race and ethnicity data, she said, it was hard for Ms. Nunez to know for certain. (Conger, Gebeloff and Oppel Jr., 7/30)
Los Angeles Times: The Grim Business Moving Latino Coronavirus Victims In Texas
The family is waiting on the lawn when Juan Lopez arrives. He walks into the house, down a hall, through a door. Amalia Tinoco lies on a bed, a 91-year-old grandmother dead after battling the coronavirus. The family won’t admit it at first, but Lopez, a man so familiar with death that funeral directors call him by a nickname, knows the story. His business is moving bodies. The grim glide of his black Cadillac Escalade is a frequent sight these days on the back roads and city streets of the Rio Grande Valley. The pandemic has brought an unrelenting tide of death to the borderlands: He has gone from transporting 15 bodies a week to 22 a day. (Hennessy-Fiske, 8/2)
The New York Times: Opera Goes On In Salzburg, With Lots And Lots Of Testing
A poster advertising this year’s Salzburg Festival bears a quotation from one of the festival’s founders, the poet and dramatist Hugo von Hofmannsthal: “Wo der Wille erwacht, dort ist schon fast etwas erreicht.” Roughly translated: “Where there’s a will, there’s a way.” Plenty of will — along with political and financial resources few other classical music organizations could possibly deploy — is evident here this summer. For its 100th anniversary season, Salzburg, bucking the coronavirus-prompted trend of canceling cultural events or presenting them only with onstage social distancing, is going ahead with performances featuring casts interacting closely and full orchestras in the pit. (Miller, 7/31)
In other issues —
The New York Times: ‘The Biggest Monster’ Is Spreading. And It’s Not The Coronavirus.
It begins with a mild fever and malaise, followed by a painful cough and shortness of breath. The infection prospers in crowds, spreading to people in close reach. Containing an outbreak requires contact tracing, as well as isolation and treatment of the sick for weeks or months. This insidious disease has touched every part of the globe. It is tuberculosis, the biggest infectious-disease killer worldwide, claiming 1.5 million lives each year. (Mandavilli, 8/3)
Politico: What Ebola Taught Susan Rice About The Next Pandemic
In October 2014, national security adviser Susan Rice was steeling herself to resign. Ten months into a vicious outbreak of Ebola, a terrifying virus that caused some victims to bleed from their eyeballs, the United States was struggling to contain its spread across West Africa. The disease had seemed to vanish in the spring only to return with a vengeance in June, to the surprise of health experts. The World Health Organization and international NGOs had proven unequal to the task. Cable networks were airing footage of corpses left to rot in the streets. President Barack Obama had sent U.S. troops to Africa, but they had yet to deploy in full. (Hounshell, 8/6)
Politico: New York City Was On The Verge Of Tackling Its Trash Problem. Then Covid Hit.
For a brief moment in early March, New York City seemed poised to tackle one of its biggest quality-of-life issues — the mounds of black trash bags that line the sidewalks every day, broiling in the summer sun and luring rats in broad daylight. City Council Speaker Corey Johnson had proposed moving forward with legislation requiring residents to separate their food and yard scraps for composting. The program, already mandated in several West Coast cities, was designed to eliminate one of the single biggest sources of waste: organic material. (Muoio, 7/30)
