Since I was able to bring my vaccination card in with me this morning, this is the first day at this job I've had since December that I've been able to come to work unmasked. Meanwhile, we were downtown on Saturday night, and Greenville is over covid. Clubs, bars, restaurants all packed, lines down the street and some flavor of bass-heavy oontz oontz oontz throbbing out of every club and bar.

Ontario generally has a 2am bar closure time (with a few exceptions) that I’ve always found rather early. Bars don’t really get pumping until 12:30 or 1. 3am would be much more appropriate at least. After that I imagine most places would start to empty out.

I’m extremely jealous of you all south of the border right now, that’s for sure. Hopefully we aren’t too much longer before we start to pull out of covid restrictions too.

Vaccine hesitancy split appears to be driven more by education than ethnicity:

I concur. I drove through Melrose/Fairfax on Sunday as well, and it definitely was hopping. Crowds of people, and lots of traffic. The Melrose Trading Post looked PACKED.

Looks like my Roaring 20s 2.0 prediction is becoming true.

Living in a rural area there hasn't been any notable changes except some business took down their "no mask no service" signs. Nobody really wore the mask outside since it's not a dense area with thousands of people walking around. Places either never shut down or opened back up a while ago...
It would be abnormal to see a person walking around, unless they are junkies/vagrants/methheads.

I took a long walk through Brooklyn yesterday that started off with no mask, but ended up putting it back on because of all the pollen in the air. The mask works extremely well to block outdoor allergens for me, so I'll probably wear these things for the rest of my life.

Was it not a normal thing before, to wear masks during allergy season?

No. Not around here, anyway. Some Asians in the SGV would wear them during allergy season pre-COVID, but a non-Asian wearing a face mask pre-COVID would have gotten some looks.

Incidentally, when I was a teen back in the 80s, my friend and I saw Michael Jackson wearing a face mask at Disneyland, and people were staring... but I think it was because he was Michael Jackson, not because he was wearing a face mask. :haha:

Nice. People actually being pragmatic.

From the Los Angeles Times:


California is seeing a COVID-19 baby bust. What is causing it?

By SONJA SHARP | STAFF WRITER
MAY 24, 2021 5 AM PT

California is poised to drop its mask mandate for a vaccine-fueled summer of lust — but when it comes to protection, Angelenos like Jahkara Smith won’t rely on antibodies alone.

“A lot of my friends have gotten IUDs recently,” said the 24-year-old Air Force veteran, a YouTube icon turned TV star. “Even if you lose your healthcare, it’s already in there. They’re not going to come take it out.”

The humble IUD, shorthand for intrauterine device, is just one of many reasons California is expected to see almost 50,000 fewer births in 2021, the nadir of a national COVID-19 “baby bust” that has sparked political backlash and left young families and would-be parents drowning in demographic quicksand. While Californians put off pregnancy in many other ways — among them prescription-free pills, self-injected hormones, and higher rates of abstinence and abortion — experts say the tiny T-shaped device helped an unprecedented number ghost the stork in recent months.

“Because I have my IUD, I have time to plan,” Smith said. “A lot of my friends talk about wanting babies — I want babies — but when you think about the tools that you’re given versus the tools you need, it feels really grim.”

Economists, demographers and reproductive health experts agree: The COVID-19 crisis capped a decade in which basic costs far outpaced wages, at the same time that the Affordable Care Act made birth control effectively free for most Americans. This is especially true in California, where fair market rent runs as much as a Tesla, preschool costs the same as UC Berkeley, and an IUD averages $0 with both public and private insurance.

“People imagine some ‘Children of Men’ situation, when in reality the pandemic freaked people out,” said Ponta Abadi, a reproductive health expert, referring to the 2006 apocalyptic thriller in which a pandemic leaves humanity infertile. “It caused a lot of people to lose their jobs and affected whether they wanted to have kids.”

Historical data bear this out, said Melissa Kearney, a professor of economics at the University of Maryland. The Spanish flu pandemic of 1918 led to a significant baby bust despite the fact that contraception was both rudimentary and almost totally illegal at the time. During the Great Recession, the birth rate declined about 1% for every percent unemployment rose.

New survey data from the Guttmacher Institute, a think tank that advocates for reproductive rights, suggest this time around the effect could be even greater. More than a third of respondents said they planned to either put off having children or have fewer because of the pandemic, which was devastating to reproductive-age women despite being far more deadly to older men. Roughly half of the 5 million women who were thrown out of work last spring had young children, and another million mothers were pushed out by the pressure of remote school in the fall and winter. Others delayed or ended pregnancies amid news that COVID-19 could be more severe and more fatal in pregnant people.

The impact was seismic: Local abortion providers were already seeing a spike in demand as early as April 2020, and clinicians across the country said they have since helped front-line healthcare workers, newly unemployed parents and working mothers-turned-teachers terminate pregnancies that, in any other year, would have ended in the delivery room.

“When things switched to virtual schools, we had to overhaul our schedule completely,” said Dr. Diane Horvath, an abortion provider in Maryland. "[Many] people told us that had we not been in the pandemic, they would have continued the pregnancy.”

But abortion remains at near historic lows, and there’s little evidence it was greater in California than in other states. Nor are millennials in the Golden State meaningfully different in educational attainment or family structures from their peers in other populous states where the decline has been more modest. Instead, experts say, a sharper spike in pandemic unemployment here put strong downward pressure on parents and would-be parents who were already strained under stagnant wages, rising rent and other economic strains that have been depressing birth rates for years.

Those pressures are especially acute in Los Angeles, where rents have increased at almost double the rate of wages in the last 10 years. Sending a preschooler to a home day-care facility now costs significantly more than sending a freshman to Cal State Long Beach; infant care exceeds undergraduate tuition at UCLA, where fees have gone up by 30% this past decade. Yet only 1 in every 4 children whose parents can afford day care in Los Angeles finds a spot. For those who rely on state subsidies, that number is 1 in 9.

"[Child care] is not just unaffordable, it’s unavailable,” said Jessica Chang, chief executive of WeeCare, the country’s largest home day-care network. “It’s a big factor for why people [here] have fewer children.”

Child care is now more expensive than housing in California, and housing is more expensive here than in any state except Hawaii.

“Housing prices took off after 2014, and that weighed heavily on people,” said Dowell Myers, a professor of urban planning and demography at USC.

That also happens to be the year IUDs emerged as one of the most popular forms of birth control in America, after decades languishing in the shadow of a failed early model that was pulled from the market before most modern users were conceived.

“IUDs are super popular with younger folks,” who’ve only ever known safe, free models, Abadi said.

In 2007, the last high watermark for American fertility, about 6% of women who were trying to prevent pregnancy used long-acting, reversible contraceptives like IUDs — already a significant jump from 2000, when about 2% did. By 2014, just three years after they became free for most patients under Obamacare, that number was close to 15%. And when access was threatened in the wake of the 2016 election, insertions surged again.

This is where the long in long-acting reversible contraceptives becomes important. A copper IUD like Smith’s can prevent pregnancy for up to 12 years — roughly a third of the average woman’s reproductive lifespan. Yet, just 12 years ago, before the Affordable Care Act, most doctors would not prescribe them to women who hadn’t had children, and getting one inserted could cost more than a first-trimester abortion. Three of the four hormonal IUDs currently on the market — and inside millions of Americans — still hadn’t been approved by the Food and Drug Administration.

That makes them more attractive to many women, since access to birth control is still limited by politics and insurance coverage even under the law.

“I got an IUD the day before my 26th birthday, when I was still covered under my parents’ insurance,” said novelist Steph Cha, who relied on hers for seven years. “When I got my IUD removed, I asked the doctor if I could take it home. I have it in my wallet — it’s a little talisman.”

Like Smith, Cha said the device let her and her husband establish themselves professionally before starting a family.

“We always wanted kids, we just put it off,” she said as she fed the couple’s 13-month-old son Leo in their Mid-City home on a recent morning. “Now seemed like a good time.”

Ironically, Cha gave birth to Leo just weeks into California’s stay-at-home order in April 2020. She was among the first Angelenos to go through labor in a face mask, amid tight new restrictions on who could attend the delivery. At the time, mothers who tested positive for the coronavirus in the hospital were being forcibly separated from their newborns, and the rare inflammatory syndrome that affects children had just been identified.

It’s clear now how terrifying those conditions were to California families. In December, when babies conceived in mid-March through early April would be expected to be born, the state saw a 10% drop-off in deliveries, compared with the 2% year-over-year decline that had been typical for about the last decade. In January, when most babies conceived in April and early May would be born, births fell a staggering 23%.

“There was so much fear and confusion — ‘What if I get pregnant, what is the effect of the infection on pregnancy?’” said Dr. Aparna Sridhar, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at UCLA. “When the pandemic was really at its peak, we were also offering pregnant women post-placental IUDs,” where the device is inserted by hand just minutes after a baby is delivered. “We were trying to prevent them from having to come back in.”

Yet, in many ways, the pandemic has been an ideal time for Cha as a new mother.

“Having both parents working at home for a whole year, I feel like we’ve weirdly benefited,” she explained while Leo toddled around Montessori-style wooden toys. “If you are the kind of person who has ... resources, now is probably a great time to do it. Whereas if you don’t know what your job situation is, or how much you’re going to have to spend on healthcare in the next year, it’s a terrible time to get pregnant.”

For reproductive healthcare workers, individuals’ ability to have children when they want to and not have them when they don’t is the ultimate goal. But tens of thousands more individuals deciding not to get pregnant at the same time worries economists and demographers, who say it could put enormous pressure on the economy in years to come.

Some believe the American Families Plan announced in April and the universal transitional kindergarten program put forward this month by Gov. Gavin Newsom will help give pregnancy back its glow. But others worry it won’t be enough to offset sharp declines in immigration — the state’s main source of population growth for years — or the ongoing economic pressures that make childbearing untenable for so many young people.

“I wish we would have bigger discussions about what’s causing people’s anxieties, outside of the pandemic,” Abadi said. “People maybe just don’t want to have kids right now ‘cause it sucks.”


Link: https://www.latimes.com/california/s...ovid-baby-bust

Yeah, same here. Only a small subset of Asians would be seen wearing face masks on public transit here in NYC prior to the pandemic. Post-pandemic, face masks will likely continue to be worn, during allergy season or cold and flu season.

Umm, what? Are you a visitor to this planet?

I hope this is temporary or only practiced by a minority of hypochondriacs.

Covering the face makes human interactions poorer and more socially distant. We learn various social cues through facial expressions as infants for a reason.

It almost certainly will, unless they keep their populations imprisoned until 2022 when they are all vaccinated.

And then the hold outs are going to be vulnerable, which means, if they continue to follow the same practice, spot lockdowns in response to “outbreaks” of 3 people catching Covid forever.

As for London, the weather here during May has been so spectacularly shitty that we might as well still be in lockdown. This would be a bad March, let alone May.

I basically only leave the apartment to go to the gym because it’s just not nice to be outside or bother to go out for dinner, etc. If we weren’t moving house in a couple of weeks, I would have left the UK again.

Yes
I mean no, some allergies seasons are bad enough to get people to wear masks for a few days. source

Wat...it's a solution for people who suffer from pretty bad allergies.

I'll take that over "death's don't matter".

There must've been several hundred people at the Trading post.
At least.

It's possible. I'm doing more myself, cause I was so pissed for not being able to enjoy myself much of the year in 2020.
It really felt like we lost a year of our lives.
Maybe that's too dramatic, but it sucked.

Not surprising. People's lives got held back a year and now they're back with a vengeance.

The most striking thing about conditions in San Francisco right now seem to me to be:

1. The odd concentration of so many of the city's formerly spread out homeless population in the center of the Tenderloin (Golden Gate, Turk, Eddy Its/Larkin, Hyde, Leavenworth, Jones) leaving much of the rest of the city looking cleaner and relatively tent-free.

2. So many boards still up on store fronts and windows (and still quite a few unrepared broken windows and/or graffitied store fronts. I honestly don't know whether this is due to covid lockdowns or BLM street actions or both or something else but it's time to get things fixed and the boards taken down--and, as usual, there is a plan:

https://www.sfchronicle.com/local-po...s-16185472.php

Restaurant business seems almost normal but with a lot of it happening outside in the "parklets" (which IMHO is more pleasant than dining inside anyway). On the other hand, since I live near the Symphony and Opera and those are still not having their regular seasons (I expect those to resume in September when they customarily do), I am basing my observation on lunch crowds and the evening, pre-performance business is probably still way off.

And re the "roaring Twenties" theory, a number of new restaurants seem to be opening or preparing to open.

I'm not riding transit but I live on a busy transit corridor and when a bus passes, I look inside to see how full it is. Most look maybe half their pre-covid ridership.

From the Los Angeles Times, a story from Friday:

0.03% chance: Getting coronavirus after being vaccinated incredibly rare in L.A. County


By RONG-GONG LIN II, LUKE MONEY
MAY 21, 2021 8:15 AM PT

It is exceedingly rare for fully vaccinated Los Angeles County residents to still get infected by the coronavirus, according to a new analysis by the Department of Public Health.

The analysis results are just the latest evidence of the remarkable effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines, and explain why even cautious public health officials have begun to endorse a widespread reopening of the California economy next month.

“These numbers show that the vaccine is working extraordinarily well to prevent infection, illness and death in almost everyone vaccinated,” L.A. County Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer said.

Of the 3.3 million L.A. County residents fully vaccinated as of May 7, only 933 — or 0.03% — later tested positive for the coronavirus, including people who showed no symptoms but were tested anyway because of workplace requirements, Ferrer said.

Furthermore, only 71 fully vaccinated residents, or 0.002%, were later hospitalized with so-called breakthrough infections. Twelve residents, or 0.00036% of fully vaccinated people, died.

Of the 12 who died, four had severely weakened immune systems, according to the analysis. In such people, vaccinations may not produce the kind of immune system response needed to adequately protect against COVID-19, experts say.

“People whose immune systems are suppressed may need to continue to take additional steps to protect themselves in seasons and in situations where COVID and other respiratory viruses are spreading more easily,” Ferrer said.

More research is needed to determine which steps those people should take.

The study was completed by matching immunization records of fully vaccinated people with people who tested positive, were hospitalized and died. The county’s results are consistent with what the state has found.

Other studies have found that being fully vaccinated results in a 97% to 99% effectiveness rate in terms of staying out of the hospital, Ferrer said.

“We now have mounting proof that these vaccines really work,” Ferrer said.

California’s vaccination rate has been declining; it peaked at 400,000 doses a day last month and is now averaging at about 226,000 a day. Still, more than two-thirds of adults in the state are now at least partially vaccinated, and among all residents, 52% have received at least one shot.

COVID-19 hospitalizations statewide are now at their lowest levels since the first weeks of the pandemic. On Thursday, Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital reported zero COVID-19 patients for the first time since March 5, 2020. “A huge milestone in our battle against this pandemic,” tweeted Dr. Vivek Jain of UC San Francisco.

L.A. County is now recording an average of just 236 new coronavirus cases a day over the past week — the lowest number on record since the first few weeks of the pandemic. At its peak, L.A. County was recording more than 15,000 new coronavirus cases a day.

As an enticement for more people to get their shots, any adult who gets vaccinated this weekend at any site run by the county or city of Los Angeles will be eligible to win a pair of Lakers season tickets.

“Thanks to the generosity of the Lakers and a deep commitment to getting us all safely to the end of the pandemic, the lucky pair will be able to watch live at the Staples Center all the home Lakers games for this upcoming season,” Ferrer said. “So this weekend, make time to get your vaccine. Not only will you gain a lot of added protection, but you may be that lucky person who gets to watch an amazing basketball team pursue another championship.”

Given the increasing level of vaccine coverage countywide, along with the growing evidence of the defense the shots provide, Ferrer said the county will follow the state’s lead regarding next month’s reopening.

“Our metrics look really, really good, and we feel really comfortable that we are approaching a time where, with sensible precautions, there can be a lot of changes in the safety modifications,” Ferrer said. “Not all of them will go away — I don’t think the state intends to get rid of all of them — but we’ll be fully aligned with the state on June 15.”

Still, L.A. County continues to have big disparities in who is getting vaccinated. Among residents age 16 to 64, only 34% of Black residents and 42% of Latino residents have received at least one dose of vaccine, while 57% of white and Native American and 67% of Asian American residents are at least partially vaccinated.

The disparity poses a risk that when mask rules are eased for vaccinated people on June 15, Latino and Black residents could face disproportionate harm if unvaccinated residents ignore the rules and stop wearing masks, leading to outbreaks among unvaccinated people.

That’s why it’ll be especially important to increase vaccination rates in those populations, Ferrer said.

“We do need to double down on our efforts to reduce any barriers to vaccination in hard-hit communities,” Ferrer said. “Everywhere that there are lots of people that are not vaccinated — that are intermingling without any distancing or mask wearing — you’ve still got opportunities for there to be outbreaks.”

Link: https://www.latimes.com/california/s...UkND7ZQxGkilxg