https://www.vox.com/2021/7/6/22554198/political-polarization-vaccine-covid-19-coronavirus

The US’s partisan divides have left much of the country vulnerable to Covid-19 — leading to unnecessary deaths.

The Covid-19 epidemic in the United States risks becoming a tale of “two Americas,” as Anthony Fauci warned in June: a nation where regions with higher vaccination rates are able to beat back the coronavirus, while those with lower vaccination rates continue to see cases and deaths.

At face value, it’s a division between those who are vaccinated and those who are unvaccinated. But, increasingly, it’s also a division between Democrats and Republicans — as vaccination has ended up on one of the biggest dividing lines in the US, political polarization.

Polarization, of course, is not a new force in American life. Growing polarization doesn’t just mean a Congress more starkly dividing between left and right; it means people’s political views now closely hew with views on seemingly unrelated issues, like which movies should win Oscars. But throughout the pandemic, polarization has manifested as stark differences in how Democrats and Republicans each approach Covid-19, from hand-washing to social distancing to masking.

That polarization has now opened political rifts in vaccination rates, with people’s decision to get a shot or not today a better predictor of states’ electoral outcomes than their votes in prior elections. It’s led the US’s vaccination campaign to hit a wall, missing President Joe Biden’s July 4 goal. Meanwhile, the more infectious delta variant is spreading, raising the risk of infections, hospitalizations, and deaths in unvaccinated — and often heavily Republican — areas.

To put it bluntly: Polarization is killing people.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/02/tech/robocall-prevention-stir-shaken/index.html

New York (CNN Business)The scourge of obnoxious robocalls has resumed after a brief dip during the early months of the pandemic. But a new prevention program developed by the Federal Communications Commission — which officially went into effect this week — could begin to offer some relief later this year.

The program, called "Stir/Shaken," is a set of technical standards that mobile carriers are required to adopt to help prevent call "spoofing," a tactic used by robocallers to make an incoming call look like it's from your area code so you're more likely to pick up. Robocalls from spoofed numbers aren't just an annoyance, they're dangerous — capable of scamming people out of money or sensitive personal information such as Social Security numbers.

Under the Stir/Shaken protocol, carriers are required to certify, with varying confidence levels, that calls really are coming from the numbers displayed on caller ID. The deadline for most big carriers to implement the standards was Wednesday and the major carriers have all said they've signed on.

The idea is this: When your wireless carrier processes an inbound call that doesn't have a certification letting it know the number is legitimate, the carrier will be able to block it before your phone ever starts ringing.
"While there is no silver bullet in the endless fight against scammers, Stir/Shaken will turbo-charge many of the tools we use in our fight against robocalls," FCC acting chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel said in a statement Wednesday.

https://news.yahoo.com/6-warning-signs-that-the-delta-variant-is-coming-for-unvaccinated-americans-090025468.html

How many unvaccinated Americans are willing to die easily preventable deaths from COVID-19 each day?

As the hyper-contagious and potentially more severe Delta variant becomes dominant here in the coming weeks, the 140 million eligible U.S. residents who haven’t been fully vaccinated yet might want to start asking themselves that question.

“COVID-19 vaccines are available for everyone ages 12 and up,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Rochelle Walensky said Tuesday at a White House briefing. “They are nearly 100 percent effective against severe disease and death — meaning nearly every death due to COVID-19 is particularly tragic, because nearly every death, especially among adults … is at this point entirely preventable.”

This, of course, wasn’t always the case. During the first year or so of the pandemic, more than 500,000 unvaccinated Americans died of COVID-19. None of them had the option of reducing their risk of dying of the disease to essentially zero by receiving a free shot that had already been safely administered to 178 million of their friends and neighbors.

But now unvaccinated Americans do have that option. By refusing it, they are opening the door to Delta.

And make no mistake: Delta is coming.

https://www.who.int/en/activities/tracking-SARS-CoV-2-variants/

Variants of Concern
A SARS-CoV-2 variant that meets the definition of a VOI (see below) and, through a comparative assessment, has been demonstrated to be associated with one or more of the following changes at a degree of global public health significance:

Increase in transmissibility or detrimental change in COVID-19 epidemiology; or
Increase in virulence or change in clinical disease presentation; or
Decrease in effectiveness of public health and social measures or available diagnostics, vaccines, therapeutics.

Hope these image screenshots display below. There are good tables showing the variants and names at the WHO link above.



Variants of Interest
A SARS-CoV-2 isolate is a Variant of Interest (VOI) if, compared to a reference isolate, its genome has mutations with established or suspected phenotypic implications, and either:

has been identified to cause community transmission/multiple COVID-19 cases/clusters, or has been detected in multiple countries; OR
is otherwise assessed to be a VOI by WHO in consultation with the WHO SARS-CoV-2 Virus Evolution Working Group.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/06/20/why-so-many-republicans-talk-about-nonsense/



The latest numbers on vaccination rates are telling: Mississippi has the lowest percentage of vaccinated residents, followed by Alabama, Arkansas, Wyoming, Louisiana, Georgia and Tennessee. All except Louisiana have both Republican governors and legislatures, as do the next seven on the list. Among the 14 U.S. senators representing the bottom seven, only two (both in Georgia) are Democrats. The Post reports, “Ten states, concentrated in the Deep South and rural West, report fewer than 35 percent of residents are fully immunized.”

Health care in these deep-red states is generally dreadful. Among the 12 states that have neither expanded nor voted to expand Medicaid, all but three have GOP governors and in those three (North Carolina, Kansas and Wisconsin), a Democratic governor faces a GOP legislature.

Of the 15 poorest states, all but two (Maine and New Mexico) are also deep red. Among the 30 Senate seats from those states, 27 are held by Republicans.

By these or just about any other measures, Republican states are failing to meet the basic needs of their residents. Among unvaccinated Americans, infection rates are climbing. More will get sick in those places, and some will die. Republicans are unwilling or incapable of meeting the challenge.

This sorry sight is unsurprising given that Republicans have all but given up on the notion of governance. At the national level, they consume themselves with race-baiting (e.g., scaring Americans about immigration and critical race theory), assailing private companies (e.g., corporations that defend voting rights, social media platforms, book publishers) and perpetrating the most ludicrous and dangerous lie in memory — that the 2020 election was stolen.

https://www.reuters.com/business/legal/brief-dol-delays-trump-era-h-1b-wage-rule-18-months-2021-05-13/

The U.S. Department of Labor on Thursday delayed until November 2022 the effective date of a Trump administration rule significantly raising the minimum wages employers must pay to highly skilled H-1B visa holders.

DOL in the rule said that putting off the new wage rates for 18 months "will provide a sufficient amount of time to thoroughly consider the legal and policy issues raised in the rule, and offer the public ... an opportunity to provide information on the sources and methods for determining prevailing wage levels."

In April, two weeks after proposing the delay, the department called for public input on how it should calculate prevailing wages levels for H-1B workers.

DOL said it was considering whether it should continue to set the wage levels at the same point for all occupations and geographic areas, or choose different levels, and whether it should continue to set prevailing wages as a percentile of what comparable American workers earn. Comments are due by June 1.

https://dcist.com/story/21/05/14/md-va-mask-mandate-covid19/



Virginia and Maryland have lifted their indoor mask mandates in line with CDC guidance issued earlier this week. Starting Saturday, residents in both states will no longer have to wear masks inside — with some exceptions, including while riding public transit and indoors at health care facilities and schools.

Businesses in both states can still require patrons to wear a mask, and employees in certain industries including restaurants, retail, fitness, personal care, and entertainment must wear masks until they are fully vaccinated. The announcement applies to everyone, but both Virginia Governor Ralph Northam and Maryland Governor Larry Hogan urged individuals who have not yet been vaccinated to do so.

“If you’re fully vaccinated, which means two weeks have passed since you received your second shot or your one dose of Johnson & Johnson, you should feel free to safely resume any activities,” Hogan said during a press conference Friday.

Virginia will relax additional COVID-19 restrictions — including expanded capacity for sports and entertainment venues, and increased social gathering limits, and allowing bars to sell alcohol after midnight — starting at midnight Friday. Maryland issued similar guidance earlier this month; all capacity restrictions on outdoor entertainment and sports venues, indoor entertainment venues, and indoor dining will drop on May 15.