vox--2020-12-29--Florida county has elderly residents camp out overnight to get Covid-19 vaccine

On Sunday , Lee County , Florida ’ s Department of Health sent out a fairly surprising press release .
Hundreds of Covid-19 vaccines would be distributed on a first-come , first-served basis at various sites throughout the county .
According to the press release , the first such distribution would begin at 2 pm on Monday , at a parks and recreation center in Estero , Florida .
Vaccines would only be available to people 65 and older .
What happened next was completely predictable .
According to the News-Press , a local Florida newspaper , hundreds of elderly @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Some of them arrived just two hours after the vaccination sites were announced .
Many of these elderly vaccine seekers wrapped themselves in sleeping bags and blankets to endure chilly weather — on Sunday , the temperature in Estero dipped as low as 46 degrees , according to the Weather Channel — and camped out hoping that they ’ d arrived soon enough to be vaccinated .
Before noon , more than two hours before vaccinations were supposed to begin , county health officials tweeted out that the Estero site was at @ @ @ @ @ @ @ debate among public health experts about how to allocate Covid-19 vaccines while the lifesaving serum is still rare .
Some experts argue that the most vulnerable populations , which include the elderly , should be prioritized .
Others argue that public-facing workers should be vaccinated first because those workers are most likely to interact with others and to spread the virus if they become infected .
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ( CDC ) , for what it ’ s worth , recommends combining these approaches .
After vaccinating health care @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , CDC guidelines call for people over the age of 75 and certain “ frontline essential workers ” to be given top priority .
Florida ’ s Republican Gov .
Ron DeSantis , meanwhile , rejected the CDC ’ s guidance , announcing earlier this month that “ our vaccines are going to be targeted for our elderly population , ” meaning residents over the age of 65 .
Yet , whatever the wisdom of prioritizing older people over frontline workers , it should go without saying that encouraging elderly residents to camp @ @ @ @ @ @ @ college students seeking tickets to a basketball game , is not an ideal public health practice .
Among other things , elderly people who are the most at risk if they become infected probably aren ’ t best suited to sleeping under the stars and enduring chilly temperatures for 12 hours or more .
Between 300 and 600 people can be vaccinated over the course of a day at these pop-up vaccination sites .
Meanwhile , Lee County has more than 770,000 residents , more than a quarter of them elderly .
Moreover @ @ @ @ @ @ @ distribution plan appears to be unusually haphazard , there are worrying early signs that the nation as a whole is struggling to distribute the vaccine quickly and efficiently .
Earlier this year , federal officials set a goal of 20 million people vaccinated by the end of December .
As of Monday , just over 2 million have been vaccinated .
There might be some lag in reporting , but even so , public health experts are raising alarm bells about the country ’ s vaccine distribution plans .
That said , the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ nations in per capita vaccine doses administered , well ahead of nations like Canada and Germany that have stable democracies and competent leadership .
The logistical challenges of distributing the vaccine are quite daunting , and they are likely to prove difficult , no matter who ’ s in the White House — or in various governor ’ s mansions .

On Sunday, Lee County, Florida’s Department of Health sent out a fairly surprising press release. Hundreds of Covid-19 vaccines would be distributed on a first-come, first-served basis at various sites throughout the county. According to the press release, the first such distribution would begin at 2 pm on Monday, at a parks and recreation center in Estero, Florida. Vaccines would only be available to people 65 and older.
What happened next was completely predictable.
According to the News-Press, a local Florida newspaper, hundreds of elderly people lined up at the vaccination site. Some of them arrived just two hours after the vaccination sites were announced. Many of these elderly vaccine seekers wrapped themselves in sleeping bags and blankets to endure chilly weather — on Sunday, the temperature in Estero dipped as low as 46 degrees, according to the Weather Channel — and camped out hoping that they’d arrived soon enough to be vaccinated.
Before noon, more than two hours before vaccinations were supposed to begin, county health officials tweeted out that the Estero site was at capacity.
There’s a robust debate among public health experts about how to allocate Covid-19 vaccines while the lifesaving serum is still rare. Some experts argue that the most vulnerable populations, which include the elderly, should be prioritized. Others argue that public-facing workers should be vaccinated first because those workers are most likely to interact with others and to spread the virus if they become infected.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), for what it’s worth, recommends combining these approaches. After vaccinating health care workers and residents of long-term care facilities, CDC guidelines call for people over the age of 75 and certain “frontline essential workers” to be given top priority.
Florida’s Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, meanwhile, rejected the CDC’s guidance, announcing earlier this month that “our vaccines are going to be targeted for our elderly population,” meaning residents over the age of 65.
Yet, whatever the wisdom of prioritizing older people over frontline workers, it should go without saying that encouraging elderly residents to camp out for vaccines, like they were college students seeking tickets to a basketball game, is not an ideal public health practice. Among other things, elderly people who are the most at risk if they become infected probably aren’t best suited to sleeping under the stars and enduring chilly temperatures for 12 hours or more.
Between 300 and 600 people can be vaccinated over the course of a day at these pop-up vaccination sites. Meanwhile, Lee County has more than 770,000 residents, more than a quarter of them elderly.
Moreover, while Lee County’s vaccine distribution plan appears to be unusually haphazard, there are worrying early signs that the nation as a whole is struggling to distribute the vaccine quickly and efficiently. Earlier this year, federal officials set a goal of 20 million people vaccinated by the end of December. As of Monday, just over 2 million have been vaccinated. There might be some lag in reporting, but even so, public health experts are raising alarm bells about the country’s vaccine distribution plans.
That said, the United States currently ranks fourth among all nations in per capita vaccine doses administered, well ahead of nations like Canada and Germany that have stable democracies and competent leadership. The logistical challenges of distributing the vaccine are quite daunting, and they are likely to prove difficult, no matter who’s in the White House — or in various governor’s mansions.


vox--2020-12-29--Are we doomed? An investigation

Are we doomed? An investigation

History is full of bad years .
536 , for example : a nonstop catastrophe .
An Icelandic volcano erupts , coating the entire northern hemisphere in ash , and ushering in the coldest decade on record .
The ash dims the sun .
There is no summer that year , and so the crops fail , leading to famine in Ireland , Scandinavia , Mesopotamia , China .
The situation does not improve .
A few years later , the Plague of Justinian threatens much of the world ’ s population .
Or 1348 : legendarily terrible !
The @ @ @ @ @ @ @ killing roughly 40 percent of the continent ’ s population .
People go to funerals and die on their way home , an endless cycle of death .
The economy collapses .
The world reverberates with a sense of despair .
1837 is an American bloodbath ; 1918 sees a deadly flu pandemic and a brutal world war ; 1968 is defined by two crushing assassinations at home and devastating carnage abroad .
And that is only the West .
If you want to be grim about it , what is history , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ bad years ?
In this context , 2020 is probably not the worst year , compared to all of human history .
If your metric is , well , did a quarter of the global population die of plague ?
Then the answer is no .
This is reassuring , I guess , if you ’ re a real glass-half-full kind of person , which I am not .
How could I be ?
It ’ s 2020 .
The year has become an incantation .
It is a running meme .
It @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the worst , but it is momentous .
It began with hellish wildfires in Australia , which would soon be mirrored by unprecedented wildfires in California , and then a deadly respiratory virus upended life as we ’ d known it , and everyone you knew was a potential vector of contagion , and the police kept killing Black people , and the president of the United States refused to commit to a peaceful transition of power , and people kept dying .
Meanwhile , there was much talk of “ murder hornets.
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ : When a beloved Virginia Christmas display went dark , that was “ because 2020.
” It is the reason a bandana-wearing iguana attacked a man in Florida , the reason Covid-19 mutated , the reason that there were so many hurricanes that we ran out of names , the reason pumpkin spice hard seltzer exists .
It is perversely thrilling to be living through history .
“ We are living through history !
” I keep thinking , inanely , as though we aren ’ t always , as though “ history @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the MTV Movie Awards , or the Tour de France .
In mid-March , a few days after New York City had settled into eerie silence , I was walking the dog when I saw a big yellow street sign that said “ End.
” Under that , someone had added , in duct tape , the word “ Times.
” Seems reasonable , I thought .
It was cold and gray in Brooklyn , and a mysterious disease had begun killing large numbers of people at random .
I didn ’ t @ @ @ @ @ @ @ any cosmic sense — just as history trundled along after 536 or 1348 , I generally assume that time will continue to heave itself forward — but for the first time , it felt plausible .
How would anyone know ?
My understanding of the apocalypse , based on Hollywood and a tenuous grasp of the Book of Revelation , is that there would be signs first .
Were these not signs ?
If it turned out this was it , who would say they had not seen it coming ?
There was @ @ @ @ @ @ @ like evidence , although evidence of what remained less clear .
The death toll in the US surpassed 300,000 in December and only continues to rise , but people have started getting the vaccine .
The president has yet to concede the election , but the Supreme Court has upheld the results .
On a good day , it is possible to feel something like hope .
But lately , hope is delicate .
We have become acutely aware that existence is fragile , that a future is not promised ; individually and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ touch-and-go .
Why not a pandemic , a depression , a famine , a blanket of ash ?
The Dark Ages happened to someone ; why not us ?
“ It does seem to me that this is the year that the enlightenment discourse about progress finally died , ” says Timothy Burke , a professor of history at Swarthmore College .
“ You can put it in the ground and put a daisy on its grave .
I don ’ t hear anyone out there anymore who says the future has to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of 2020 is not that we ’ re doomed , necessarily , only that doom feels like a legitimate possibility .
Why not a pandemic , a depression , a famine , a blanket of ash ?
The Dark Ages happened to someone ; why not us ?
This should not be surprising , given that we have been warned for centuries , by all kinds of people , only some of whom were leaders of fringe cults .
Others , though , were historians , seismologists , climate scientists , archaeologists , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the End , in a Biblical sense , but simply suggesting that we were not , in fact , too modern to fail .
Are we failing ?
I wanted to know .
Is this what failure was supposed to look like ?
I called astrologers : Had they seen this coming ?
Was the year as catastrophic as it felt ?
I asked historians .
I turned to theologians who study apocalyptic texts ; I talked to preppers , figuring that people bracing for disaster might know how to recognize it early @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , might be able to explain something I couldn ’ t , which is : What was 2020 , and what happens now ?
Coby Coonradt and Cameron Hardy live in Utah near the Colorado border , which was once a hub of dinosaur activity and is now a hub of bones .
Together , they co-host the Casual Preppers Podcast , which is also how they classify themselves : Just because you have a 25-year food supply in your basement doesn ’ t mean you can ’ t also be a regular @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
“ A lot of people hear ‘ prepper ’ and immediately think of the NatGeo series , Doomsday Preppers , ” Coonradt tells me , but that ’ s not them .
“ Our goal is to try and get rid of that stigma.
” When they met , in 2014 , they realized they were both into “ survival , or the apocalypse , ” Coonradt says , “ So we decided to get a little bit more into it .
That ’ s when we said , hey , let @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s talk about this stuff .
This is too much fun.
” The show vacillates between the extreme and the extremely practical .
In the last four years , they have covered fires , bunkers , polar bears , the logistics of prepping with a family , guns , gardening , bartering , smartphones , aliens , and World War III .
It is , for them , a hobby — a “ mindset , ” Hardy says .
“ It just feels like a manly thing , to be prepared , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ take care of your family in the event of a disaster without relying on other people or the government.
” Part of disaster preparedness is that you never know exactly what the disaster is going to be , or on what scale .
“ One of our biggest things is preparing for your own personal apocalypse , ” says Coonradt , meaning that you want a plan for biowarfare , but also for what happens if your car breaks down .
I want to understand what part of this is fun .
One @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is take long walks to places that sell novel sandwiches .
One thing Coonradt and Hardy like to do is imagine circumstances that many people will not survive .
“ It ’ s almost a comfort to talk about these things , ” explains Coonradt , “ because the more you talk about them , the more you work them out.
” Certainly , they ’ d been worried about pandemics , but in an abstract way .
Back in 2018 , they ’ d done an episode about them .
“ Several @ @ @ @ @ @ @ biggest fear , of all the different types of scenarios , is a pandemic , because of how fast and how devastating it can be , ” says Hardy .
But as Coonradt will tell you , bracing for the possibility of something is not the same as expecting it .
“ I think I actually said , at one point during that initial craziness , ‘ I really liked prepping better when it was a hobby !
’ ” Prepping put them ahead in some ways , but in others , they @ @ @ @ @ @ @ had N95 masks already .
They did not have yeast .
Mostly , prepping shaped their attitude : It was bad , but they ’ d been expecting even worse .
“ Could have been worse ” is their general take on 2020 .
The election did not spark the violence they ’ d anticipated .
“ The outcome was about as good as we could hope for , ” Coonradt says , quickly clarifying that doesn ’ t mean politically .
Although , he adds , he doesn ’ t not mean @ @ @ @ @ @ @ stay neutral .
Preppers “ tend to lean to the right of the aisle , ” but over the course of the Trump years , that ’ s started to change .
“ We have seen a lot of people from the left coming into prepping , ” he says brightly .
It is nice to see that people agree on something , I suppose , even if the thing that they agree on is the possibility of societal collapse .
When I ’ d thought about the End before , which I @ @ @ @ @ @ @ imagined it would be definitive .
The way I pictured it , drawn mainly from disaster movies I have not seen , is that there would be an apocalyptic event , asteroid , maybe , or an ice age — I didn ’ t dwell on details — and then that would be it .
This , Kyle Lambelet , a professor at Emory ’ s Candler School of Theology , suggests gently , is perhaps not the most useful way to think about it .
“ Apocalypse ” comes from the Greek @ @ @ @ @ @ @ or disclose .
“ So rather than asking whether this is the end , I think it ’ s more interesting to ask what ’ s being revealed here , ” he explains .
“ And the things I think are being revealed are that we ’ re vulnerable to each other .
That we share breath with one another , and when that breath becomes diseased , we can do harm to one another.
” But it has also revealed that while we all may be vulnerable , “ we ’ re @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” The fact that communities of color have been hit disproportionately hard by the pandemic is a societal problem , not a viral one : “ Covid invades a world that has been constructed in such a way that race has fundamentally distorted our relationships to one another.
” This isn ’ t new information .
Apocalypses only uncover what is already true .
In 2020 , “ we realized that the familiar routines that have constructed our world were not as stable as maybe we thought they were , ” says Lambelet @ @ @ @ @ @ @ forget that , mostly , and now suddenly , you can ’ t .
On a day-to-day basis , this is a bummer .
On a grand scale , it is a cause for hope .
The earliest apocalyptic writings emerged under oppressive empires , for people living under siege .
“ There ’ s a lot of crazy stuff in these visionary texts , ” he says , between the seven-headed dragons and the thousand-eyed cherubim .
“ But their primary message is this : This world is not all there is.
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ , then there is a reason to keep going .
“ The world is always ending , ” says author-musician-anarchist-prepper Margaret Killjoy , who hosts the podcast Live Like the World Is Dying .
It ’ s just that right now , the world seems to be ending with unusual intensity .
“ I think it ’ s okay to let this be a big deal , ” she tells me , which I find perversely reassuring .
“ This was a big deal .
A lot of people haven ’ t survived @ @ @ @ @ @ @ t. ” It is true that the unit of “ a year ” is arbitrary , a social construct , she agrees .
“ But social constructs have meaning .
We can do with them what we want.
” “ We absolutely have to keep going , ” Killjoy adds , pointing to the rise of mutual aid networks , to the summer ’ s uprisings .
“ The existing economies haven ’ t been working for a lot of people for a long time , and alternative ideas are possible right now.
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ I tend to think of the apocalyptic as a rich set of practices for disinvesting from the world , ” he tells me .
This is more optimistic than it sounds .
He points me to a passage from the theologian Thomas Lynch : “ Nature , capital , gender , and race summarize the set of relations that constitute the world , ” Lynch writes .
“ And this world is both violent and inescapable.
” “ If we think of the world that way , ” says Lambelet , “ then @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that world .
We would hope for the end of that world , so that we could turn toward relationships of solidarity with our neighbors.
” I want that .
Certainly , I would like to imagine that there is something beyond this .
You could be blindsided by 2020 yet understand that there was a precedent for almost all of it , that none of this came out of nowhere .
You could explain the wildfires , and the pandemic , and the election , and its aftermath .
You could explain @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Still , things are always happening , obviously , but these seemed biblical , what with the plagues and pests and fires , against the understated backdrop of attempted coup .
Every year feels like the worst year ever , people kept saying , sagely , which made sense , but this wasn ’ t the regular churn of history , was it ?
Maybe it ’ s ridiculous to demand that 2020 have some kind of cosmic meaning , given that it is an arbitrary 365-day period .
But I am not @ @ @ @ @ @ @ I turned to astrologers .
I am also not an “ astrology person ” ; still , I had to check .
John Marchesella , a veteran astrologer based in New York City , did not hesitate .
“ What ’ s going on in the sky is very special , ” he tells me .
“ It is the end of an era and the beginning of a new era.
” There is an expression in astrology : “ As above , so below , ” meaning that whatever is going in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , and this year , the sky was weird .
“ The main thing is the alignment of Saturn and Pluto , ” Marchesella says .
This is the “ conjunction ” people keep talking about : The two planets have been moving together all year , peaking in January — when China announced the new coronavirus , he notes — and are only just coming out of alignment now .
“ When Saturn and Pluto align , there is usually some worldwide health issue , ” he explains .
“ The last @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was the outbreak of AIDS , between the summers of 1981 and ’ 82.
” Pluto “ has a lot to do with viruses , ” while “ Saturn is manifestation , ” Marchesella says .
“ Anytime the world has experienced some major plague — the Spanish flu , the bubonic plague — the alignment of Saturn and Pluto were always somehow present in the sky.
” It is not that he saw Covid-19 coming specifically , only that as the two planets began to come into alignment , it was astrologically @ @ @ @ @ @ @ kind of health care crisis was coming .
“ But it ’ s not until the alignment became exact that we found out what the crisis in health care was going to be.
” Before that , he ’ d assumed it would be health insurance .
Astrology is not science , but for millions of people — almost 30 percent of Americans , according to a 2017 Pew Research Center poll — it is a way to find logic in a world we can neither predict nor control .
It suggests that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ overlapping cycles , and that , by reading into patterns of the heavens , we can find some semblance of order on the world .
Whether you do anything or not , nothing stays the same for too long .
Astrology is not science , but for millions of people it is a way to find logic in a world we can neither predict nor control When we talk , in mid-December , Saturn and Jupiter were starting to move into alignment in the sign of Aquarius , which , Marchesella says , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ so inclined , you might note that this just happens to coincide with the first doses of the vaccine .
What follows will be “ a wave of optimism , ” Marchesella says .
It will be “ a wave of brotherhood .
We will all get on the same page about climate change .
We ’ ll get on the same page about how medical emergencies can affect the entire world.
” There are years , Burke , the history professor , observes , when people , even in the moment , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ shifted , that the year is not like other years .
He points to 1848 : Revolutions broke out all over Europe .
Monarchies teetered on collapse .
“ It ’ s one of those years where everybody gets the clear picture : Things are not going to be the same going forward , ” he says .
1917 and 1918 are like that , too : There is World War I , the Bolshevik Revolution , the flu .
It is universally momentous .
You could be having a great year , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ — and it doesn ’ t matter .
“ Objectively , you have a sense that the world went badly , and that you were part of that .
In a bad year , it ’ s much easier for people to feel that their life is under threat.
” “ We ’ re pattern recognizers , ” Burke tells me .
Bad years are bad because bad things happen , which establishes a narrative , and then , he says , “ We start fitting everything into the Zeitgeist of the story @ @ @ @ @ @ @ everything becomes an affirmation of just how bad it is , ” even when the actual events are relatively ordinary .
It is only when you add to the list with disease and wildfires and hurricanes and rising poverty and crumbling democratic norms that you can look at the death of a celebrity well over 80 and see it not as a loss but as a sign .
It can be true the climate is in crisis , that this is likely not the last pandemic , that doom is not out of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ most days , life goes on , and people get married and divorced and have kids and do dishes and tell jokes and lose keys .
At this point , we can safely say that 2020 was not the end of life on earth , just the end of certainty .
Intellectually , we ’ d known this ; of course the future wasn ’ t guaranteed .
If you ’ d asked before , “ Is human society on a steady upward trajectory ?
” we would have said no , and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that .
Civilizations rise and fall , we ’ d all understood , only we hadn ’ t meant our civilization , not while we were living in it .
It is embarrassingly naive to admit faith in the inevitability of progress .
At the same time , it is a nice way to get through the day .
Or at least , it was nice while it lasted .
Whatever Panglossian sense we ’ d had that we were living in the best of all possible worlds , Burke says — that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ now aware that even if things could get better , that we have a lot of work to do .
And there ’ s nothing inevitable about it .
There ’ s no force driving us towards better and better.
” If there is hope , it will come from whatever actions we take next .
Rachel Sugar is a writer in New York .

History is full of bad years. 536, for example: a nonstop catastrophe. An Icelandic volcano erupts, coating the entire northern hemisphere in ash, and ushering in the coldest decade on record. The ash dims the sun. There is no summer that year, and so the crops fail, leading to famine in Ireland, Scandinavia, Mesopotamia, China. The situation does not improve. A few years later, the Plague of Justinian threatens much of the world’s population.
Or 1348: legendarily terrible! The Black Death sweeps through Europe, eventually killing roughly 40 percent of the continent’s population. People go to funerals and die on their way home, an endless cycle of death. The economy collapses. The world reverberates with a sense of despair.
1837 is an American bloodbath; 1918 sees a deadly flu pandemic and a brutal world war; 1968 is defined by two crushing assassinations at home and devastating carnage abroad. And that is only the West. If you want to be grim about it, what is history, really, but the study of very bad years?
In this context, 2020 is probably not the worst year, compared to all of human history. If your metric is, well, did a quarter of the global population die of plague? Then the answer is no. This is reassuring, I guess, if you’re a real glass-half-full kind of person, which I am not. How could I be? It’s 2020.
The year has become an incantation. It is a running meme. It may not, in fact, be the worst, but it is momentous. It began with hellish wildfires in Australia, which would soon be mirrored by unprecedented wildfires in California, and then a deadly respiratory virus upended life as we’d known it, and everyone you knew was a potential vector of contagion, and the police kept killing Black people, and the president of the United States refused to commit to a peaceful transition of power, and people kept dying. Meanwhile, there was much talk of “murder hornets.”
A trickle-down theory of crisis emerged: When a beloved Virginia Christmas display went dark, that was “because 2020.” It is the reason a bandana-wearing iguana attacked a man in Florida, the reason Covid-19 mutated, the reason that there were so many hurricanes that we ran out of names, the reason pumpkin spice hard seltzer exists.
It is perversely thrilling to be living through history. “We are living through history!” I keep thinking, inanely, as though we aren’t always, as though “history” were a discrete event, like the MTV Movie Awards, or the Tour de France.
In mid-March, a few days after New York City had settled into eerie silence, I was walking the dog when I saw a big yellow street sign that said “End.” Under that, someone had added, in duct tape, the word “Times.” Seems reasonable, I thought.
It was cold and gray in Brooklyn, and a mysterious disease had begun killing large numbers of people at random. I didn’t think it was the End, in any cosmic sense — just as history trundled along after 536 or 1348, I generally assume that time will continue to heave itself forward — but for the first time, it felt plausible. How would anyone know?
My understanding of the apocalypse, based on Hollywood and a tenuous grasp of the Book of Revelation, is that there would be signs first. Were these not signs? If it turned out this was it, who would say they had not seen it coming?
There was evidence everywhere; the whole year felt like evidence, although evidence of what remained less clear. The death toll in the US surpassed 300,000 in December and only continues to rise, but people have started getting the vaccine. The president has yet to concede the election, but the Supreme Court has upheld the results. On a good day, it is possible to feel something like hope.
But lately, hope is delicate. We have become acutely aware that existence is fragile, that a future is not promised; individually and collectively, the whole project seems pretty touch-and-go. Why not a pandemic, a depression, a famine, a blanket of ash? The Dark Ages happened to someone; why not us?
“It does seem to me that this is the year that the enlightenment discourse about progress finally died,” says Timothy Burke, a professor of history at Swarthmore College. “You can put it in the ground and put a daisy on its grave. I don’t hear anyone out there anymore who says the future has to be brighter and better.”
The lesson of 2020 is not that we’re doomed, necessarily, only that doom feels like a legitimate possibility.
Why not a pandemic, a depression, a famine, a blanket of ash? The Dark Ages happened to someone; why not us?
This should not be surprising, given that we have been warned for centuries, by all kinds of people, only some of whom were leaders of fringe cults. Others, though, were historians, seismologists, climate scientists, archaeologists, and epidemiologists, who were not forecasting the End, in a Biblical sense, but simply suggesting that we were not, in fact, too modern to fail. Are we failing? I wanted to know. Is this what failure was supposed to look like?
I called astrologers: Had they seen this coming? Was the year as catastrophic as it felt? I asked historians. I turned to theologians who study apocalyptic texts; I talked to preppers, figuring that people bracing for disaster might know how to recognize it early. All of them, I hoped, might be able to explain something I couldn’t, which is: What was 2020, and what happens now?
Coby Coonradt and Cameron Hardy live in Utah near the Colorado border, which was once a hub of dinosaur activity and is now a hub of bones. Together, they co-host the Casual Preppers Podcast, which is also how they classify themselves: Just because you have a 25-year food supply in your basement doesn’t mean you can’t also be a regular dude with a family and a job.
“A lot of people hear ‘prepper’ and immediately think of the NatGeo series, Doomsday Preppers,” Coonradt tells me, but that’s not them. “Our goal is to try and get rid of that stigma.”
When they met, in 2014, they realized they were both into “survival, or the apocalypse,” Coonradt says, “So we decided to get a little bit more into it. That’s when we said, hey, let’s start a podcast. Let’s talk about this stuff. This is too much fun.” The show vacillates between the extreme and the extremely practical. In the last four years, they have covered fires, bunkers, polar bears, the logistics of prepping with a family, guns, gardening, bartering, smartphones, aliens, and World War III.
It is, for them, a hobby — a “mindset,” Hardy says. “It just feels like a manly thing, to be prepared, to be self-sustaining, be able to take care of your family in the event of a disaster without relying on other people or the government.” Part of disaster preparedness is that you never know exactly what the disaster is going to be, or on what scale. “One of our biggest things is preparing for your own personal apocalypse,” says Coonradt, meaning that you want a plan for biowarfare, but also for what happens if your car breaks down.
I want to understand what part of this is fun. One thing I like to do for fun is take long walks to places that sell novel sandwiches. One thing Coonradt and Hardy like to do is imagine circumstances that many people will not survive.
“It’s almost a comfort to talk about these things,” explains Coonradt, “because the more you talk about them, the more you work them out.”
Certainly, they’d been worried about pandemics, but in an abstract way. Back in 2018, they’d done an episode about them. “Several times, we’ve said our biggest fear, of all the different types of scenarios, is a pandemic, because of how fast and how devastating it can be,” says Hardy. But as Coonradt will tell you, bracing for the possibility of something is not the same as expecting it. “I think I actually said, at one point during that initial craziness, ‘I really liked prepping better when it was a hobby!’ ”
Prepping put them ahead in some ways, but in others, they were just like everybody else. They had N95 masks already. They did not have yeast. Mostly, prepping shaped their attitude: It was bad, but they’d been expecting even worse.
“Could have been worse” is their general take on 2020. The election did not spark the violence they’d anticipated. “The outcome was about as good as we could hope for,” Coonradt says, quickly clarifying that doesn’t mean politically. Although, he adds, he doesn’t not mean politically. Politically, they try to stay neutral. Preppers “tend to lean to the right of the aisle,” but over the course of the Trump years, that’s started to change. “We have seen a lot of people from the left coming into prepping,” he says brightly.
It is nice to see that people agree on something, I suppose, even if the thing that they agree on is the possibility of societal collapse.
When I’d thought about the End before, which I tried not to, I’d imagined it would be definitive. The way I pictured it, drawn mainly from disaster movies I have not seen, is that there would be an apocalyptic event, asteroid, maybe, or an ice age — I didn’t dwell on details — and then that would be it.
This, Kyle Lambelet, a professor at Emory’s Candler School of Theology, suggests gently, is perhaps not the most useful way to think about it. “Apocalypse” comes from the Greek word “apokaluptein” — to uncover or disclose. “So rather than asking whether this is the end, I think it’s more interesting to ask what’s being revealed here,” he explains. “And the things I think are being revealed are that we’re vulnerable to each other. That we share breath with one another, and when that breath becomes diseased, we can do harm to one another.” But it has also revealed that while we all may be vulnerable, “we’re not all vulnerable in the same way.”
The fact that communities of color have been hit disproportionately hard by the pandemic is a societal problem, not a viral one: “Covid invades a world that has been constructed in such a way that race has fundamentally distorted our relationships to one another.” This isn’t new information. Apocalypses only uncover what is already true.
In 2020, “we realized that the familiar routines that have constructed our world were not as stable as maybe we thought they were,” says Lambelet. Under normal circumstances, you could forget that, mostly, and now suddenly, you can’t. On a day-to-day basis, this is a bummer. On a grand scale, it is a cause for hope.
The earliest apocalyptic writings emerged under oppressive empires, for people living under siege. “There’s a lot of crazy stuff in these visionary texts,” he says, between the seven-headed dragons and the thousand-eyed cherubim. “But their primary message is this: This world is not all there is.” And if there is something else, then there is a reason to keep going.
“The world is always ending,” says author-musician-anarchist-prepper Margaret Killjoy, who hosts the podcast Live Like the World Is Dying. It’s just that right now, the world seems to be ending with unusual intensity. “I think it’s okay to let this be a big deal,” she tells me, which I find perversely reassuring. “This was a big deal. A lot of people haven’t survived. A lot more people won’t.” It is true that the unit of “a year” is arbitrary, a social construct, she agrees. “But social constructs have meaning. We can do with them what we want.”
“We absolutely have to keep going,” Killjoy adds, pointing to the rise of mutual aid networks, to the summer’s uprisings. “The existing economies haven’t been working for a lot of people for a long time, and alternative ideas are possible right now.”
Lambelet tends to agree. “I tend to think of the apocalyptic as a rich set of practices for disinvesting from the world,” he tells me. This is more optimistic than it sounds.
He points me to a passage from the theologian Thomas Lynch: “Nature, capital, gender, and race summarize the set of relations that constitute the world,” Lynch writes. “And this world is both violent and inescapable.”
“If we think of the world that way,” says Lambelet, “then absolutely, we would want to renounce that world. We would hope for the end of that world, so that we could turn toward relationships of solidarity with our neighbors.”
I want that. Certainly, I would like to imagine that there is something beyond this.
You could be blindsided by 2020 yet understand that there was a precedent for almost all of it, that none of this came out of nowhere. You could explain the wildfires, and the pandemic, and the election, and its aftermath. You could explain police violence and Brexit and hurricanes. Still, things are always happening, obviously, but these seemed biblical, what with the plagues and pests and fires, against the understated backdrop of attempted coup. Every year feels like the worst year ever, people kept saying, sagely, which made sense, but this wasn’t the regular churn of history, was it?
Maybe it’s ridiculous to demand that 2020 have some kind of cosmic meaning, given that it is an arbitrary 365-day period. But I am not an expert in the cosmos, so I turned to astrologers. I am also not an “astrology person”; still, I had to check.
John Marchesella, a veteran astrologer based in New York City, did not hesitate. “What’s going on in the sky is very special,” he tells me. “It is the end of an era and the beginning of a new era.”
There is an expression in astrology: “As above, so below,” meaning that whatever is going in the sky is reflected here on Earth, and this year, the sky was weird. “The main thing is the alignment of Saturn and Pluto,” Marchesella says. This is the “conjunction” people keep talking about: The two planets have been moving together all year, peaking in January — when China announced the new coronavirus, he notes — and are only just coming out of alignment now. “When Saturn and Pluto align, there is usually some worldwide health issue,” he explains. “The last time this happened, for example, was the outbreak of AIDS, between the summers of 1981 and ’82.”
Pluto “has a lot to do with viruses,” while “Saturn is manifestation,” Marchesella says. “Anytime the world has experienced some major plague — the Spanish flu, the bubonic plague — the alignment of Saturn and Pluto were always somehow present in the sky.”
It is not that he saw Covid-19 coming specifically, only that as the two planets began to come into alignment, it was astrologically clear, he contends, that some kind of health care crisis was coming. “But it’s not until the alignment became exact that we found out what the crisis in health care was going to be.” Before that, he’d assumed it would be health insurance.
Astrology is not science, but for millions of people — almost 30 percent of Americans, according to a 2017 Pew Research Center poll — it is a way to find logic in a world we can neither predict nor control. It suggests that history is determined by a system of overlapping cycles, and that, by reading into patterns of the heavens, we can find some semblance of order on the world. Whether you do anything or not, nothing stays the same for too long.
Astrology is not science, but for millions of people it is a way to find logic in a world we can neither predict nor control
When we talk, in mid-December, Saturn and Jupiter were starting to move into alignment in the sign of Aquarius, which, Marchesella says, brings hope. And if you were so inclined, you might note that this just happens to coincide with the first doses of the vaccine.
What follows will be “a wave of optimism,” Marchesella says. It will be “a wave of brotherhood. We will all get on the same page about climate change. We’ll get on the same page about how medical emergencies can affect the entire world.”
There are years, Burke, the history professor, observes, when people, even in the moment, have the sense that something fundamentally has shifted, that the year is not like other years.
He points to 1848: Revolutions broke out all over Europe. Monarchies teetered on collapse. “It’s one of those years where everybody gets the clear picture: Things are not going to be the same going forward,” he says. 1917 and 1918 are like that, too: There is World War I, the Bolshevik Revolution, the flu. It is universally momentous. You could be having a great year, personally — healthy, loving, nonviolent — and it doesn’t matter. “Objectively, you have a sense that the world went badly, and that you were part of that. In a bad year, it’s much easier for people to feel that their life is under threat.”
“We’re pattern recognizers,” Burke tells me. Bad years are bad because bad things happen, which establishes a narrative, and then, he says, “We start fitting everything into the Zeitgeist of the story we’ve been telling, and everything becomes an affirmation of just how bad it is,” even when the actual events are relatively ordinary. It is only when you add to the list with disease and wildfires and hurricanes and rising poverty and crumbling democratic norms that you can look at the death of a celebrity well over 80 and see it not as a loss but as a sign.
It can be true the climate is in crisis, that this is likely not the last pandemic, that doom is not out of the question, and also true that most days, life goes on, and people get married and divorced and have kids and do dishes and tell jokes and lose keys. At this point, we can safely say that 2020 was not the end of life on earth, just the end of certainty.
Intellectually, we’d known this; of course the future wasn’t guaranteed. If you’d asked before, “Is human society on a steady upward trajectory?” we would have said no, and we would have believed that we believed that. Civilizations rise and fall, we’d all understood, only we hadn’t meant our civilization, not while we were living in it. It is embarrassingly naive to admit faith in the inevitability of progress. At the same time, it is a nice way to get through the day.
Or at least, it was nice while it lasted.
Whatever Panglossian sense we’d had that we were living in the best of all possible worlds, Burke says — that’s gone. “Everybody is now aware that even if things could get better, that we have a lot of work to do. And there’s nothing inevitable about it. There’s no force driving us towards better and better.”
If there is hope, it will come from whatever actions we take next.
Rachel Sugar is a writer in New York.


vox--2020-12-29--Los Angeles is America’s new coronavirus hot spot. Urban sprawl might’ve played a role.

In the early , uncertain days of the pandemic , city life was under attack .
A Twitter cohort of self-appointed pundits began declaring that a middle-class migration was nigh , that Americans were rapidly leaving urban centers for sprawling suburban and rural areas .
News outlets ran op-eds that seemed to bolster these claims , from writers who assumed that there was a correlation between population density and the coronavirus infection rate .
“ Density Is New York City ’ s Big ‘ Enemy ’ in the Coronavirus Fight , ” read a New York Times headline from March @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
The coronavirus proves them right , ” declared a Los Angeles Times op-ed in late April .
As the coronavirus trickled into less-dense regions of the South and Midwest , however , those claims were swiftly backtracked .
Since the start of the pandemic , urbanists have argued that the effectiveness of government response helped bustling cities in Taiwan , Japan , Vietnam , and South Korea avoid severe outbreaks .
In June , findings published by the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health determined that city density was not directly linked @ @ @ @ @ @ @ researchers attributed the propensity of spread and Covid-19 mortality rates to factors like metropolitan size , education , race , age , and implementation of social distancing policies .
Still , as the coronavirus accelerates across Southern California , officials say density and other geographic specificities play a not-so-insignificant role in daily pandemic life — impacting how residents react to the crisis surrounding them .
“ Los Angeles has the combination of poverty and density that leads to a virus like this being able to spread much more quickly and be much more @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the Los Angeles Times .
In such a sprawling city , the everyday incidences of crowding at grocery stores or restaurants — combined with residents ’ perceived physical and emotional isolation — are frustrating for the public , which is grappling with changing guidelines .
When as many as 1 in 80 people is infected , unwitting contamination is likelier than ever .
The coronavirus is anything but an equalizer .
It has exacerbated hardships for low-income families , who have lost their livelihoods and lives .
And in major US cities , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ working-class communities of color have experienced higher infection and mortality rates , particularly in high-poverty regions .
The differences in these rates , researchers said , could be attributed to factors like household crowding , proportion of essential workers , and access to testing and health care .
When it comes to Los Angeles , certain pockets are not just denser , but also poorer , with high rates of poverty and homelessness and a large population of essential workers that have been hardest hit by the virus .
The county , which @ @ @ @ @ @ @ has reported an average of about 14,000 new daily coronavirus cases over the past seven days .
But in the wake of record-breaking infection rates , shoppers didn ’ t seem deterred in the lead-up to the Christmas holiday .
Aerial footage above the Citadel Outlets in southeast Los Angeles County on December 19 — two days after Southern California ICUs ran out of available beds — shows a jam-packed parking lot , as hundreds of masked shoppers congregated in long , snaking lines .
The Grove , another outdoor shopping destination in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ according to concerned Angelenos on Twitter , despite county policy limiting retail capacity to 20 percent .
There seems to be large-scale cognitive dissonance to the severity of the pandemic — not just in California , but across the country — which is only growing worse , as millions are set to receive the first vaccine dose .
Hospitals are overloaded with a tidal wave of patients , and Southern California doctors worry they will soon have to ration care to those who need it most .
Yet , Americans are still heading @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ( some illegally ) , and taking a pandemic-era record number of flights .
The situation in Southern California is dire , to say the least .
So why is there little to no urgency among residents ?
There is currently no sign that Los Angeles County and the state of California have reached their peak caseload , and Gov .
Gavin Newsom has hinted at extending stay-at-home orders amid the troubling surge of cases .
Perhaps more concerningly , “ there is no precedent for how well a lockdown will work ” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ John Swartzberg , an infectious disease expert at UC Berkeley , told the Los Angeles Times .
While California might be the current coronavirus capital of America , cases in almost every state have surpassed existing records .
There are myriad reasons : pandemic fatigue , inconsistent public health messaging , holiday gatherings , and little to no enforcement of policies intended to reduce the virus ’ s spread .
In the midst of this third wave , environmental psychologists are examining the shifts in human behavior as the US enters its ninth @ @ @ @ @ @ @ study how people interact with the spaces they inhabit , from local neighborhoods to broader urban contexts .
Thoughtful urban design , as it relates to population density and city life , is crucial in fostering a sense of social connection and solidarity during a time when so many residents are isolated from one another .
“ It seems that California did a good job flattening the curve in April , ” said Jennifer Jane Roe , director of the University of Virginia ’ s Center for Design and Health .
“ That @ @ @ @ @ @ @ urban design , people were complying with public health guidelines .
But with this exponential rise in Covid , it ’ s a behavioral problem , as well as a policy one , and it ’ s also possible that the strain has become more virulent.
” In most parts of the United States , the climate has changed since the summer , prompting people to move their gatherings indoors .
The weather is temperate year-round in Southern California , but due to its sprawling geography , Roe thinks its car culture — @ @ @ @ @ @ @ centers and strip malls — can lead residents to feel sequestered , even from neighbors .
Many have abstained from seeing family and friends now for months .
And while most Californians are under strict stay-at-home orders , the regional inconsistencies have confused and angered residents .
In early December , Los Angeles County had closed its playgrounds and banned small outdoor meetings , an order that has since been reversed .
As an LA Times reporter put it , people are entering the “ why-is-this-closed-while-that-is-open ” stage of the pandemic .
While @ @ @ @ @ @ @ spaces remained open , drawing in large crowds .
“ You have a culture of people driving in their cars around town , to places that are open like shopping malls , which might have poorer ventilation than a park , even if part of it is outdoors , ” Roe told me .
“ The other problem with car culture is people aren ’ t connecting on a daily basis with those around them , which doesn ’ t help their mental health.
” Sprawl could exacerbate people ’ s feelings of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ months .
In addition , Los Angeles County is notoriously “ park poor ” : A city assessment conducted in 2016 found that 51 percent of residents don ’ t live within a 10-minute , half-mile walk to a park .
Green space is crucial in combating the effects of sprawl , Roe added , as designated locations where people can safely socialize at a distance .
“ You have a culture of people driving in their cars to places that are open like shopping malls , which might have poorer ventilation than @ @ @ @ @ @ @ more time outdoors .
Instead of 45 minutes at a local park , they ’ re staying for more than two hours , ” she said .
“ The pandemic has sent a clear message to urban planners that we need more trails , outdoor play areas for children , and public parks in places where people don ’ t have gardens or convenient access to outdoor space.
” Environmental psychologists , urban planners , and public health experts have encouraged cities to preserve access to open green areas , which can improve @ @ @ @ @ @ @ even as they stay isolated within their own social circles .
While Californians have car access to parks , beaches , and trails , health experts say the prolonged strictness of officials ’ “ stay home ” messaging has worn down the public .
And in a place as dense and geographically complex as Southern California , that can prove devastating .
“ One way to look at this is through the lens of pluralistic ignorance .
When a community conforms to what they think others want , they may end up doing @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , a professor of psychology at Penn State , wrote to me over email .
“ In the case of Covid-19 , we look around our immediate environment to see how others are behaving .
If we privately worry about the spread of Covid but do not see concern from others , over time we can create and maintain an illusion of calm.
” According to Bennett , pluralistic ignorance is a powerful social tool in situations where danger is ambiguous or difficult to determine .
That might explain the influx of Angelenos @ @ @ @ @ @ @ dining is deemed unsafe by local officials but malls are open , then malls must be less risky .
In urban environments , people are drawn to certain visual or sonic cues , like sirens or changes in foot and vehicle traffic , to evaluate a crisis .
“ In a sprawling city like Los Angeles , we are less likely to notice an increase in emergency vehicles compared to a city that has a similar population size within a smaller geographic area , ” he said .
“ The same is true @ @ @ @ @ @ @ don ’ t notice a dramatic difference , so we conclude it must not be that serious.
” Early in the pandemic , some wrongly assumed the prevalence of car culture would shield Angelenos from a coronavirus outbreak as severe as New York City ’ s .
Commuting by yourself in a car , after all , is a form of social distancing .
“ It seemed that Angelenos could finally claim a real advantage in having an identity that included an embarrassing , carbon-emitting , traffic-jammed , sprawl-and-crawl culture , ” writer @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Times opinion piece .
But the coronavirus is not like other crises : the earthquakes , extreme heat waves , and wildfires Californians are acutely aware of .
Our earliest unscientific assumptions about how the virus transmits and proliferates are premature at best and erroneous at worst .
There is “ a rolling state of danger ” in this pandemic , Bennett said : “ Because of the nature of Covid , we are given the opportunity to evaluate and reevaluate our behavioral decisions as the danger continues .
This type of constant @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” That is perhaps another explanation for the frustrating lack of urgency held by Americans in varying states and cities — that , as nationwide cases dipped between the summer and the fall , the worst was over .
Since the behaviors of our neighbors were slow to shift , we were lulled into complacency , as Bennett suggested .
“ Will Los Angeles reach the painful peak New York has experienced ?
Probably not , ” Wilentz wrote in late May .
Despite all evidence currently pointing to the contrary , it @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is still true .

In the early, uncertain days of the pandemic, city life was under attack. A Twitter cohort of self-appointed pundits began declaring that a middle-class migration was nigh, that Americans were rapidly leaving urban centers for sprawling suburban and rural areas. News outlets ran op-eds that seemed to bolster these claims, from writers who assumed that there was a correlation between population density and the coronavirus infection rate.
“Density Is New York City’s Big ‘Enemy’ in the Coronavirus Fight,” read a New York Times headline from March. “Angelenos like their single-family sprawl. The coronavirus proves them right,” declared a Los Angeles Times op-ed in late April. As the coronavirus trickled into less-dense regions of the South and Midwest, however, those claims were swiftly backtracked.
Since the start of the pandemic, urbanists have argued that the effectiveness of government response helped bustling cities in Taiwan, Japan, Vietnam, and South Korea avoid severe outbreaks. In June, findings published by the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health determined that city density was not directly linked to higher infection rates. Rather, researchers attributed the propensity of spread and Covid-19 mortality rates to factors like metropolitan size, education, race, age, and implementation of social distancing policies.
Still, as the coronavirus accelerates across Southern California, officials say density and other geographic specificities play a not-so-insignificant role in daily pandemic life — impacting how residents react to the crisis surrounding them. “Los Angeles has the combination of poverty and density that leads to a virus like this being able to spread much more quickly and be much more devastating,” Mayor Eric Garcetti told the Los Angeles Times.
In such a sprawling city, the everyday incidences of crowding at grocery stores or restaurants — combined with residents’ perceived physical and emotional isolation — are frustrating for the public, which is grappling with changing guidelines. When as many as 1 in 80 people is infected, unwitting contamination is likelier than ever.
The coronavirus is anything but an equalizer. It has exacerbated hardships for low-income families, who have lost their livelihoods and lives. And in major US cities, from Atlanta to New York City, working-class communities of color have experienced higher infection and mortality rates, particularly in high-poverty regions. The differences in these rates, researchers said, could be attributed to factors like household crowding, proportion of essential workers, and access to testing and health care. When it comes to Los Angeles, certain pockets are not just denser, but also poorer, with high rates of poverty and homelessness and a large population of essential workers that have been hardest hit by the virus.
The county, which has more than 10 million residents, has reported an average of about 14,000 new daily coronavirus cases over the past seven days. But in the wake of record-breaking infection rates, shoppers didn’t seem deterred in the lead-up to the Christmas holiday. Aerial footage above the Citadel Outlets in southeast Los Angeles County on December 19 — two days after Southern California ICUs ran out of available beds — shows a jam-packed parking lot, as hundreds of masked shoppers congregated in long, snaking lines. The Grove, another outdoor shopping destination in Hollywood, has been similarly packed, according to concerned Angelenos on Twitter, despite county policy limiting retail capacity to 20 percent.
I’m at the “several friends of mine have lost their parents” part of covid and I drove past the grove yesterday and it was PACKED. I’m losing my mind. 1 in 20 ppl here have it. Why is there no urgency? Why is there no leadership? — Akilah Hughes (@AkilahObviously) December 18, 2020
There seems to be large-scale cognitive dissonance to the severity of the pandemic — not just in California, but across the country — which is only growing worse, as millions are set to receive the first vaccine dose. Hospitals are overloaded with a tidal wave of patients, and Southern California doctors worry they will soon have to ration care to those who need it most. Yet, Americans are still heading to the mall, hosting holiday gatherings (some illegally), and taking a pandemic-era record number of flights.
The situation in Southern California is dire, to say the least. So why is there little to no urgency among residents? There is currently no sign that Los Angeles County and the state of California have reached their peak caseload, and Gov. Gavin Newsom has hinted at extending stay-at-home orders amid the troubling surge of cases. Perhaps more concerningly, “there is no precedent for how well a lockdown will work” with the sheer number of infections, John Swartzberg, an infectious disease expert at UC Berkeley, told the Los Angeles Times.
While California might be the current coronavirus capital of America, cases in almost every state have surpassed existing records. There are myriad reasons: pandemic fatigue, inconsistent public health messaging, holiday gatherings, and little to no enforcement of policies intended to reduce the virus’s spread.
In the midst of this third wave, environmental psychologists are examining the shifts in human behavior as the US enters its ninth month of the crisis. These researchers study how people interact with the spaces they inhabit, from local neighborhoods to broader urban contexts. Thoughtful urban design, as it relates to population density and city life, is crucial in fostering a sense of social connection and solidarity during a time when so many residents are isolated from one another.
“It seems that California did a good job flattening the curve in April,” said Jennifer Jane Roe, director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Design and Health. “That suggests, at least in respect to urban design, people were complying with public health guidelines. But with this exponential rise in Covid, it’s a behavioral problem, as well as a policy one, and it’s also possible that the strain has become more virulent.”
In most parts of the United States, the climate has changed since the summer, prompting people to move their gatherings indoors. The weather is temperate year-round in Southern California, but due to its sprawling geography, Roe thinks its car culture — combined with the popularity of commercial retail centers and strip malls — can lead residents to feel sequestered, even from neighbors. Many have abstained from seeing family and friends now for months. And while most Californians are under strict stay-at-home orders, the regional inconsistencies have confused and angered residents.
In early December, Los Angeles County had closed its playgrounds and banned small outdoor meetings, an order that has since been reversed. As an LA Times reporter put it, people are entering the “why-is-this-closed-while-that-is-open” stage of the pandemic. While playgrounds were closed, malls and retail spaces remained open, drawing in large crowds.
“You have a culture of people driving in their cars around town, to places that are open like shopping malls, which might have poorer ventilation than a park, even if part of it is outdoors,” Roe told me. “The other problem with car culture is people aren’t connecting on a daily basis with those around them, which doesn’t help their mental health.”
Sprawl could exacerbate people’s feelings of restlessness and isolation over a period of months. In addition, Los Angeles County is notoriously “park poor”: A city assessment conducted in 2016 found that 51 percent of residents don’t live within a 10-minute, half-mile walk to a park. Green space is crucial in combating the effects of sprawl, Roe added, as designated locations where people can safely socialize at a distance.
“You have a culture of people driving in their cars to places that are open like shopping malls, which might have poorer ventilation than a park”
“People are spending more time outdoors. Instead of 45 minutes at a local park, they’re staying for more than two hours,” she said. “The pandemic has sent a clear message to urban planners that we need more trails, outdoor play areas for children, and public parks in places where people don’t have gardens or convenient access to outdoor space.”
Environmental psychologists, urban planners, and public health experts have encouraged cities to preserve access to open green areas, which can improve residents’ mood and mental health, even as they stay isolated within their own social circles. While Californians have car access to parks, beaches, and trails, health experts say the prolonged strictness of officials’ “stay home” messaging has worn down the public. And in a place as dense and geographically complex as Southern California, that can prove devastating.
“One way to look at this is through the lens of pluralistic ignorance. When a community conforms to what they think others want, they may end up doing what nobody wants,” Kevin Bennett, a professor of psychology at Penn State, wrote to me over email. “In the case of Covid-19, we look around our immediate environment to see how others are behaving. If we privately worry about the spread of Covid but do not see concern from others, over time we can create and maintain an illusion of calm.”
According to Bennett, pluralistic ignorance is a powerful social tool in situations where danger is ambiguous or difficult to determine. That might explain the influx of Angelenos eager to holiday shop: If outdoor dining is deemed unsafe by local officials but malls are open, then malls must be less risky. In urban environments, people are drawn to certain visual or sonic cues, like sirens or changes in foot and vehicle traffic, to evaluate a crisis.
“In a sprawling city like Los Angeles, we are less likely to notice an increase in emergency vehicles compared to a city that has a similar population size within a smaller geographic area,” he said. “The same is true for vehicle and foot traffic. We don’t notice a dramatic difference, so we conclude it must not be that serious.”
Early in the pandemic, some wrongly assumed the prevalence of car culture would shield Angelenos from a coronavirus outbreak as severe as New York City’s. Commuting by yourself in a car, after all, is a form of social distancing. “It seemed that Angelenos could finally claim a real advantage in having an identity that included an embarrassing, carbon-emitting, traffic-jammed, sprawl-and-crawl culture,” writer Amy Wilentz wrote in a New York Times opinion piece.
But the coronavirus is not like other crises: the earthquakes, extreme heat waves, and wildfires Californians are acutely aware of. Our earliest unscientific assumptions about how the virus transmits and proliferates are premature at best and erroneous at worst. There is “a rolling state of danger” in this pandemic, Bennett said: “Because of the nature of Covid, we are given the opportunity to evaluate and reevaluate our behavioral decisions as the danger continues. This type of constant evaluation opens the door for pluralistic ignorance.”
That is perhaps another explanation for the frustrating lack of urgency held by Americans in varying states and cities — that, as nationwide cases dipped between the summer and the fall, the worst was over. Since the behaviors of our neighbors were slow to shift, we were lulled into complacency, as Bennett suggested. “Will Los Angeles reach the painful peak New York has experienced? Probably not,” Wilentz wrote in late May. Despite all evidence currently pointing to the contrary, it appears that some are willfully hoping that is still true.


vox--2020-12-29--The Covid-19 relief bill has saved up to 40 million people from eviction — for now

Renters at risk of eviction have narrowly avoided catastrophe — at least for another month .
Congress ’ s latest stimulus package ( which President Donald Trump finally signed late Sunday night ) extended a federal eviction moratorium by one month , until the end of January .
The prohibition on kicking people out of their homes for not paying rent is an important safeguard — in August , the Aspen Institute warned that up to 40 million Americans were at risk of eviction this year if economic conditions remained unchanged .
But it ’ s also one that kicks @ @ @ @ @ @ @ moratoriums are a Band-Aid solution that don ’ t address the root cause of not being able to pay rent .
It ’ s significant then that Congress included $ 25 billion in renters assistance , particularly in a year that so demonstrated the importance of home .
Staying housed became even more of a life-and-death issue in 2020 , as Covid-19 took more than 300,000 lives and infected nearly 20 million people in the US alone .
Research showed that evictions could have increased the pandemic ’ s death toll , as @ @ @ @ @ @ @ friends or family or ending up homeless , both of which make it nearly impossible to follow public health guidelines around social distancing .
That makes the $ 25 billion in rental assistance even more of a significant victory for landlords and renters alike .
There is widespread expert and industry consensus that rental assistance is the only real solution to keeping people housed and stabilizing the market .
The $ 25 billion will be sent to states to disperse as they see fit .
Depending on where you live you might have @ @ @ @ @ @ @ state or a local relief agency .
Some states already have rental relief administration programs and others will need to design them quickly to meet demand .
There are sure to be complications around making sure those in the most dire circumstances are first in line to receive the aid .
Importantly , the $ 25 billion in rental assistance isn ’ t the only money that could go toward ameliorating renters ’ collective back rent .
The stimulus package also includes $ 600 stimulus checks ( which might become $ 2,000 checks @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of which will help struggling families make rent .
It ’ s a significant sum of money , but the uncertainty around negotiations has made it difficult for families to plan .
Until the evening of December 27 , when the President finally signed the relief package , millions of renters nationwide believed they could be evicted in just over three days .
Still , there ’ s a lot more that needs to be done if America is going to prevent financial catastrophe for the bottom end of the rental market .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ , estimated that at least $ 25.1 billion would be owed come January .
That might now be covered — but Moody ’ s Analytics ’ chief economist Mark Zandi put the figure even higher , estimating that up to $ 70 billion could be owed by year ’ s end .
Direct financial assistance is the only way to keep people housed and landlords solvent The tens of millions of renters who could owe tens of thousands of dollars each and face eviction are , of course , the highest-risk group if @ @ @ @ @ @ @ their needs .
However , there will also undoubtedly be second-order effects on landlords and the affordable housing market writ large that could have serious consequences .
A good chunk of affordable housing in America is owned by individual investors or “ mom-and-pop ” landlords .
This can be surprising because many people think of rental property owners as being part of giant corporations , but 41 percent of the nation ’ s 48.2 million rental housing units ( not just affordable housing units ) are owned by these mom-and-pop property owners .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ the average rent in small rental properties is less than “ the median for single-family rentals , medium-size apartment buildings , and large apartment buildings.
” And in 2018 , “ the median income for a two-to-four-unit landlord was $ 67,000.
” Renters of these units are predominantly Black and Hispanic , and they have the lowest median household income when compared to renters of other types of properties .
This means that renters of small properties tend to be poorer and tend to work in industries that were most harmed by Covid-19 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ construction , to name a few .
On top of that , the landlords they rent from are some of the least capable of absorbing the loss of income from unpaid rent .
Many of these landlords have mortgages of their own , and all of them are required to maintain their properties — which means operating costs continue even as rent payments decline .
If these affordable housing units are lost because landlords are unable to keep up with the costs of maintaining these properties , it ’ s likely to raise @ @ @ @ @ @ @ equity firms or investors flip these properties to service a higher-income population .
It ’ s a dynamic that played out following the 2008 financial crisis — and it could happen again if we ’ re not careful .
President-elect Joe Biden , who hasn ’ t announced his position on a national ban on evictions , will have the opportunity to extend the eviction moratorium without Congressional approval when he is sworn in on January 20 .
Looking to Biden ’ s Housing and Urban Development agency review team , it seems @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ban on evictions during this crisis .
Biden ’ s team includes Peggy Bailey , a housing policy leader at the Center on Budget and Public Priorities , who co-authored a recent report in favor of a federal eviction ban ; and Solomon Greene of the Urban Institute , who has spoken positively about the CDC ’ s evictions moratorium .
But once widespread vaccination is a reality and the public health cost of evictions decreases , tens of millions of renters could lose eviction protections and still owe thousands to landlords .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ the K-shaped recovery that has spurred on a booming housing market as the bottom end of the rental market sees the floor fall from beneath it .

Renters at risk of eviction have narrowly avoided catastrophe — at least for another month.
Congress’s latest stimulus package (which President Donald Trump finally signed late Sunday night) extended a federal eviction moratorium by one month, until the end of January.
The prohibition on kicking people out of their homes for not paying rent is an important safeguard — in August, the Aspen Institute warned that up to 40 million Americans were at risk of eviction this year if economic conditions remained unchanged. But it’s also one that kicks the can down the road. Eviction moratoriums are a Band-Aid solution that don’t address the root cause of not being able to pay rent.
It’s significant then that Congress included $25 billion in renters assistance, particularly in a year that so demonstrated the importance of home.
Staying housed became even more of a life-and-death issue in 2020, as Covid-19 took more than 300,000 lives and infected nearly 20 million people in the US alone. Research showed that evictions could have increased the pandemic’s death toll, as eviction comes hand-in-hand with crowding in with friends or family or ending up homeless, both of which make it nearly impossible to follow public health guidelines around social distancing.
That makes the $25 billion in rental assistance even more of a significant victory for landlords and renters alike. There is widespread expert and industry consensus that rental assistance is the only real solution to keeping people housed and stabilizing the market.
The $25 billion will be sent to states to disperse as they see fit. Depending on where you live you might have to apply for the assistance to the state or a local relief agency. Some states already have rental relief administration programs and others will need to design them quickly to meet demand. There are sure to be complications around making sure those in the most dire circumstances are first in line to receive the aid.
Importantly, the $25 billion in rental assistance isn’t the only money that could go toward ameliorating renters’ collective back rent. The stimulus package also includes $600 stimulus checks (which might become $2,000 checks) and extended unemployment insurance, both of which will help struggling families make rent. It’s a significant sum of money, but the uncertainty around negotiations has made it difficult for families to plan. Until the evening of December 27, when the President finally signed the relief package, millions of renters nationwide believed they could be evicted in just over three days.
Still, there’s a lot more that needs to be done if America is going to prevent financial catastrophe for the bottom end of the rental market. Stout, a global advisory consulting firm, estimated that at least $25.1 billion would be owed come January. That might now be covered — but Moody’s Analytics’ chief economist Mark Zandi put the figure even higher, estimating that up to $70 billion could be owed by year’s end.
Direct financial assistance is the only way to keep people housed and landlords solvent
The tens of millions of renters who could owe tens of thousands of dollars each and face eviction are, of course, the highest-risk group if direct financial assistance can’t cover their needs. However, there will also undoubtedly be second-order effects on landlords and the affordable housing market writ large that could have serious consequences.
A good chunk of affordable housing in America is owned by individual investors or “mom-and-pop” landlords. This can be surprising because many people think of rental property owners as being part of giant corporations, but 41 percent of the nation’s 48.2 million rental housing units (not just affordable housing units) are owned by these mom-and-pop property owners.
Research from the Urban Institute shows that the average rent in small rental properties is less than “the median for single-family rentals, medium-size apartment buildings, and large apartment buildings.” And in 2018, “the median income for a two-to-four-unit landlord was $67,000.” Renters of these units are predominantly Black and Hispanic, and they have the lowest median household income when compared to renters of other types of properties.
This means that renters of small properties tend to be poorer and tend to work in industries that were most harmed by Covid-19: food service, retail, and construction, to name a few. On top of that, the landlords they rent from are some of the least capable of absorbing the loss of income from unpaid rent. Many of these landlords have mortgages of their own, and all of them are required to maintain their properties — which means operating costs continue even as rent payments decline.
If these affordable housing units are lost because landlords are unable to keep up with the costs of maintaining these properties, it’s likely to raise rents as supply dwindles or large private equity firms or investors flip these properties to service a higher-income population. It’s a dynamic that played out following the 2008 financial crisis — and it could happen again if we’re not careful.
President-elect Joe Biden, who hasn’t announced his position on a national ban on evictions, will have the opportunity to extend the eviction moratorium without Congressional approval when he is sworn in on January 20. Looking to Biden’s Housing and Urban Development agency review team, it seems his advisers are sympathetic to a national ban on evictions during this crisis. Biden’s team includes Peggy Bailey, a housing policy leader at the Center on Budget and Public Priorities, who co-authored a recent report in favor of a federal eviction ban; and Solomon Greene of the Urban Institute, who has spoken positively about the CDC’s evictions moratorium.
But once widespread vaccination is a reality and the public health cost of evictions decreases, tens of millions of renters could lose eviction protections and still owe thousands to landlords. It’s a stark example of the K-shaped recovery that has spurred on a booming housing market as the bottom end of the rental market sees the floor fall from beneath it.