Let's look at some case counts for states with high vaccination rates.
New Hampshire has given at least one dose to 84.9% of its population.
Vermont has given at least one dose to 65.2% of its population.
Massachusetts has given at least one dose to 62.4% of its population.
Hawaii has given at least one dose to 60.9% of its population.
New Jersey has given at least one dose to 56.1% of its population.
Pennsylvania has given at least one dose to 54.6% of its population.
California has given at least one shot to 53.1% of its population.
And New York has given at least one shot to 51.8% of its population.
Of all of these, the only really worrying result is Hawaii, which has given 60.9% of is population at least one shot, but hasn't seen cases start to trend steadily downward yet.
I wonder why. Low levels of acquired immunity? Pockets of unvaxed people partying?
Washington is also...not amazing? 51.9% first-shot vaccination rate, but at best you can see the very beginning of a downtrend.
Anyway, the upshot here is that vaccines do work, but the game isn't over once you hit 50%. Antivaxers hoping to free-ride on other people should think again, and go get their shots.
(end)
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
2/Most of the discourse around China in Western media these days is about U.S.-China competition (e.g. this podcast by @DKThomp and @RushDoshi). But I thought I'd write about something a little more positive -- the idea that China is building The Future.
2/After Covid, there was a general sense that America needed to be REBUILT -- not just from the pandemic, but from the aftermath of the Great Recession, the Rust Belt, and decades of institutional decay.
3/People argued about HOW to rebuild America. Naturally, progressives thought it would be more government-directed, while conservatives thought it would come from the private sector and from defense spending.
This is a very subtle and interesting question. It seems clear that right-wing interest in personal health is a response to the terrible health of non-college Americans. And the rightists are trying to invent an alternative approach that resists the hegemony of academia.
The fact is, college-educated Americans tend to be hypocritical about health. They watch what they eat, get lots of exercise, and try to eat "organic", but they preach fat acceptance and a disability-based approach to poor health. Rightists don't know how to deal with that.
In fact, this is representative of a broader pattern. College-educated progressives get married and stay marriage, but denigrate the idea of marriage. They work hard but denigrate the idea of hard work. Their personal success is based on rampant, galloping hypocrisy.
1/Here's something a lot of people I talk to don't understand about Japanese urbanism, and why Japanese cities are so special.
2/Japanese cities feel different than big, dense cities elsewhere -- NYC, London, and Paris, but also other Asian cities like Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Singapore.
There are many reasons for this, but today I'll focus on one: Zakkyo buildings.
3/When many people think of "mixed-use development", they think of stores on the first floor, apartments on the higher floors. This is sometimes called "shop-top housing" or "over-store apartments".
This is how most cities in the world do mixed-use development.
1/Here's something I've been wondering about recently: How did the U.S. miss the battery revolution?
With every other technological revolution, we anticipated it well in advance, and as a result we were the first -- or one of the first -- to take advantage of it.
2/The U.S. invented the computer, the internet, and modern AI. On all three of those, we were (or are) the leading nation. We talked ad infinitum about the benefits of those digital technologies long before they became a reality, allowing us to shape their eventual use.
3/We did the Human Genome Project. We invented mRNA vaccines. We did most of the research that drove down the costs of solar power. Jimmy Carter put solar panels on the White House more than 30 years before it became economical.